THE STATUS AND FUNCTION OF DIVINE
SIMPLENESS IN SUMMA THEOLOGIAE Ia, qq. 2-13
PETER BURNS,

S.J.

l esuit School of Theology
Berkeley, California

I

Introduction

N THE FIRST PART of what follows I hope to do four
things: a) to give a brief summary of Aquinas's remarks
contained in the third question of the first part of the Summa
Theologiae, entitled de Dei simplicitate; b) to outline two diferent ways of interpreting what Aquinas is about when making
those remarks; c) to assess which interpretation is better from
an exegetical standpoint; d) to assess which interpretation is better from a philosophical standpoint. In the second part my aim
will be threefold : a) to trace the way Aquinas derives and uses
the concept of divine simpleness in questions 2 through 11 ; b) to
examine briefly the relationship between this concept and possible
cosmological arguments for the existence of God; and c) to
evaluate critically some modern treatments of arguments of the
cosmological type in the light of this relationship. I shall not be
concerned to show that Aquinas's conclusions in question 2 (the
Five Ways) are justified by the arguments he adduces; rather,
my concern will be to show that an adequate evaluation of his
arguments cannot ignore the function of divine simpleness as a key
element therein.

I. The Status Of Divinle Simpleness
(1) A Summary of S.T. la, 3
At the beginning of question 3 Aquinas lists eight points of
inquiry. The first is whether God is a body, that is, composed

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S.J.

of extended parts. He offers three reasons why he thinks the
reply must be negative. Firstly, an unchanging first cause of
change, which God is (by la, 2, 3) would appear not to be bodily,
since experience offers no examples of bodies causing change
without themselves changing. Secondly, to be extended in space
implies the potentiality of being divisible, but a primary reality is
utterly actual, since absolutely speaking, actuality precedes
tentiality, and God is the primary reality. Thirdly, since the soul
is nobler than inanimate things, and God is the most excellent of
beings, God cannot be any less noble than the soul. But the soul
in itself is not bodily but that in virtue of which bodies are what
they are.
In the next article Aquinas denies that God is composed of
matter and form because matter is potential and only exists by
participating in some form. In addition, since agents act in virtue
of their form, God, as the prime source of activity and being in
no way potential, must be considered as being essentially form
without composition with matter, Aquinas then asks whether
God can be identified with his own essence or nature. Given that
matter is the individuating factor in beings composed of matter
and form, and that such composition is ruled out in case of God,
Aquinas claims that the distinctness of his being must be due to
form. Hence God is his own form or nature or essence. In a
crucial move in the next article Aquinas identifies God, who is
his essence, with his existence, for as an uncaused necessary
reality this essence must be self-subsistent. Thus God's nature
or essence is necessarily self-instantiating, nor does God participate in existence, but essentially is identical with (the act of)
'existing', Therefore the distinction between essence and existence, between what something is and that it is, does not hold for
God.
Having daimed that God is his own existence, Aquinas argues
that this existence is prior to genus in general and to the genus of
substance specifically. So there is no possibility of distinguishing
in God genus and difference, nor can God receive predicates as a
substance, since this would imply potentiality. Therefore God is

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not composed of substance and accidents. In article 7, Aquinas
claims that God is altogether simple. After summing up the
previous remarks he makes two general points. Everything composite is subsequent to and dependent on its components, whereas
God is the first, uncaused necessary being. Secondly, everything
composite is caused, for essentially diverse elements must be
caused to unite, but God is uncaused. This entails that in all
composite beings there is some element not sharing a common
predicate with the whole. In the last point of inquiry, Aquinas
denies that God enters into composition with other things. As
first cause God is distinct from all subsequent causes and effects.
As the primary and immediate source of activity he cannot be a
component in other agents. Since God does not partake of anything he cannot participate in the substantial being of other
things, but is their being only causatively.
(2) Two interpretations
Whether one thinks Aquinas is correct on these points will
depend not only on the view one takes of his reasoning, but also
on what one considers the nature of his enterprise to be. The
importance of determining this latter question has sometimes been
neglected by commentators and critics alike, and so the usefulness
and validity of their comments and criticisms are to that extent
undermined. In this article I shall employ the terms ' doctrine'
and ' grammar ' to denote two different ways of understanding
the import of Aquinas's treatment of this subject. Broadly speaking, I intend by the word 'doctrine' that approach which sees
Aquinas's utterances in this part of the Summa as making ontological assertions about the reality called God which Aquinas
claims in question 2 can be successfully referred to. By ' grammar' I mean the approach which takes the question on God's
simpleness to be about the logical rules which must underpin and
govern theological language. That both activities are simultaneously compatible is a possibility that I do not wish to rule out
at the outset. And it may turn out that on any interpretation
there will still be considerable philosophical difficulties facing the

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S.J.

Thomist position, but I am not primarily interested in that question here.
A treatment of divine simpleness which I think exemplifies the
' doctrine ' approach is provided by William E. Mann. 1 He uses
the term ' doctrine' and refers to his subject matter as the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS). This terminology in itself
does not tell us how he regards the type of claims Aquinas is making in S. T. 1 a, 3. His article, however, does appear to treat divine simpleness as a real feature of divine being, crucial and, in
a loose sense of the word, definitive of God's existence. His conclusion is that God is just a special, 'rich' property-instance,
and that this is what the DDS amounts to. He explains his position in the following way. He notes Aquinas's tendency to assimilate sentences of the forms ' God is F ' and ' God is F -ness ' to
sentences of the form 'God is his F-ness '. God cannot have being through some quality which is not itself identical with himself without violating what later scholastics called his aseity. An
uncaused necessary being cannot depend on anything else for its
existence. So instead of " God is wisdom " or " God is wise " we
should say, "God is his wisdom." And we should avoid saying
that " God is wise and just and good and .... " We should say
instead, " God's wisdom, justice, goodness, etc., are identical with
God." Now phrases like 'God's wisdom' and so on, Mann
thinks of as definite descriptions referring to instances of properties. The question then is, how can instances of different properties be identical. Mann thinks that if

1) divine attributes are necessarily co-extensive (i.e. if it were impossible to instantiate being omniscient without also instantiating
being omnipotent, and so forth), and if
2) necessarily co-extensive attributes are necessarily identical, then
3) God, if he exists, is an instance of the property of being a Godhead (where the last mentioned property is defined by the set of
all its instances).
Now if a property is nothing but the set of

its instances, it

1 William E. Mann, " Divine Simplicity," Religious Studies vol. 18, no. 4
(December 1982), pp. 451-471.

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follows that necessarily co-extensive properties are necessarily
identical. This view of properties rejects the idea that distinct
predicate expressions refer ipso facto to distinct properties. On
this view different predicates may have a single, common referent
although connoting different verbal meanings. Some recent philosophers, notably Saul Kripke, 2 have adopted this view of properties. Hence, for example, having a certain temperature is just
having a certain mean molecular kinetic energy. Now Aquinas, in
a very important passage of the Summa Theologiae, rejects the
notion that divine predicates are synonymous, while insisting on
a unique and common referent for their instantiation. He says,
Thus the words we use for the perfections we attribute to God, although they signify what is one, are not synonymous, for they signify
it from many different points of view . . . That is why he is one
thing described in many ways, for our minds learn of him in the
many ways he is represented in creatures. 3
Mann relies on this statement to claim that while the properties
predicated (analogously) of God differ in sense, what instantiates
them in God is a single referent. Hence, property-instances, the
F-ness of x and the G-ness of y, are identical if
1) being Fis necessarily co-extensive with being G, and
2) x=y.

Mann concludes that God is an instance of a conjunctive property.
To show that a personal being can be thought of as a propertyinstance, he introduces the notion of a rich property, which is a
single, very long, conjunctive property. So Smith might instantiate the property of being fat and lazy and stupid, etc. Each person, then, is an instance of a unique rich property. That there
can be only one instantiation of the property of being a Godhead
needs argument. 4 There is, then, for Mann no ontological disSaul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1980).
S. T. la, 13, 4 (Blackfriars edition). Perhaps in this context translating
the verb 'significare' as 'to refer' might illuminate better Aquinas's thought
in this connection.
4 Cf. S. T. la, 11, 3.
2

3

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PETER. BURNS,

S.J.

tinction between God's attributes. He admits, however, that it is
still difficult to demonstrate that the divine attribues are necessarily co-extensive. 5
Be this as it may, Mann's account of divine simpleness appears
to be a description of the ontologically constitutive structure of
divine being. We are being informed about what is the case with
God. Mann's concern is with how a reality judged to be simple
can really be so. Aquinas's remarks in S.T. la, 13, 4 (quoted
above) are taken and used by Mann to state a thesis about property-instance identity which will hold with respect to God if he
exists, not as cautioning us about the force of our language about
God. The stress is on the via eminentiae, not the via negationis.
Of course, Mann does not think that definite descriptions of God
enable us to imagine what God is like, any more than mathematical descriptions referring to sub-atomic particle behavior,
curved space-time, ' black holes ' or electro-magnetic fields provide us with veridical images of these realities. We only know
how to give such mathematical descriptions from the effects of
the realities in question. But such descriptions may be true and
informative. We are presented by science with a body of knowledge, in effect, a doctrine of the physical universe. 11 Mann, I
think, sees Aquinas's work in an analogous light.
Something of a contrast to this way of thinking is to be found
5 There is also some difficulty in accepting a set-extensional
account of
properties. It would seem to follow from such an account that being a
centaur and being a prime number between 7 and 11 would be the same property, the property of not being instantiated. Perhaps this odd result could be
averted if we allowed literary references to centaurs to provide us with a
known set of individuated instances of being a centaur. But this procedure has
problems of its own. How are we to count references to unspecified numbers
of centaurs, and what about thoughts about centaurs or drawings of centaurs?
Are they not on a par with literary centaurs?
6 It is true that some scientists,
especially theoretical physicists, hold a
more or less instrumental or operationalist view of their own work. However
I think that they should still be taken as presenting us with a ' doctrine ' of
the universe, and not simply a 'grammar' for talk about the physical world,
because their instrumentalism is connected not so much with the proper rules
for scientific discourse, as with a particular view of the kind of extra-linguistic reference that discourse has (namely, its observable and predictable
consequences).

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in David B. Burrell's book, Aquinas: God and Action. 1 According to Burrell, the premise that language and reality are structurally isomorphic underlies all attempts at philosophical analysis.
That this is not the case where the reality in question is God, is
what Aquinas is trying to establish in S.T. la, 3, in Burrell's
view. There is no isomorphic relation between language and the
reality of God-this is what saying God is simple amounts to.
All subject-predicate forms are strictly inappropriate to God.
Aquinas wants to show that the nature of God cannot be stated.
Hence Burrell entitles his first chapter, "The Grammar of Divinity". He thinks Aquinas wants to set out linguistic rules to the
effect that human discourse systematically fails to exhibit the
reality of God. For Burrell then, Aquinas is engaged in a reflection on the rules for interpreting discourse concerning the divine, a reflection that enables us to 'characterize' what cannot be
described. Questions 3 through 11 stake out what Burrell terms
a depth grammar 'in divinis '. So in his second chapter he poses
and replies to the central question :
What then is Aquinas up to in these questions which treat God's
simpleness, perfection, limitlessness, unchangeableness and oneness?
My contention is that he is engaged in the metalinguistic project of
mapping out the grammar appropriate 'in divinis '. He is proposing
the logic proper to discourse about God.8
Earlies he makes quite clear what Aquinas is not up to :
All this, remember, is by way of considering not what God is but
what he is not. If this be a ' doctrine of God ', it is a dreadfully
austere one. Taken as a doctrine of God, it spawns the notorious
God of' classical theism' not unrelated to Blake's Nobodaddy. But a
perceptive reader would think twice before identifying a deliberate
consideration of what God is not with a teaching presuming to say
what God is. We could expect a doctrine of God to say what God is
like, yet Aquinas is clear enough in warning us not to expect that
1 David B. Burrell, Aquinas: God and Actfon (London, Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1979).
s Burrell, Aquinas, pp. 16, 17.

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PETER BURNS, S.J.

of him. Nevertheless, commentators and critics have assumed that
he is offering us just that-a doctrine of God-in questions 3 through
11.9

We are confirmed in our belief that Burrell wishes his remarks to
be taken seriously when, after discussing Aquinas's treatment of
the arguments against God's being bodily, he claims that a) the
arguments do not prove that God is not a body, and b) that God
might well have a body, and c) that this is not the point of the
inquiry anyway. 10
The difference of interpretative approach from that of Mann is
by now, I hope, quite perceptible. Burrell agrees that question 3
is the absolutely vital one for understanding Aquinas's thought in
this part of the Summa. Simpleness is not just another attribute
along with per{ection, limitlessness and the rest. It is a determinative principle for understanding and accepting all that follows.
For Burrell, it is this basic denial of compositeness, whether logical or ontological, formal or material, that opens up the way for
Aquinas to ' characterize ' God, but without stating or at least
intending to state anything factually and positively informative
about God's nature. Aquinas's task is to outline a logic that will
allow us to articulate the non-articulability of transcendent being.
One is easily reminded of Wittgenstein's remark, "Whereof we
cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent." But for Aquinas,
the ' whereof ' exists.
( 3) The exegetical question
I now wish to examine the approaches of Mann and Burrell
with respect to their merits as pieces of exegesis. In a prologue
to question 3 Aquinas says that we cannot know what God is,
but only what he is not, and that therefore we cannot consider
the way in which God exists but only the ways in which he does
not. In S.T. 1a, 12, 12 Aquinas maintains that reason can know
that a simple form is, even though it cannot attain an understanding of what it is. Burrell's interpretation demands that these
o Ibid., p. 13.

10 Ibid., p. 20.

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statements be given their full weight. But some important clues
for solving the exegetical question are contained in question 13
which deals explicitly with theological language. In article 1 of
that question Aquinas claims that we can successfully refer to God
using abstract or concrete nouns although neither type by itself
exhibits God as being simple and subsistent. This is due to
God's essence being identical with his existence.
Burrell tries to shed some light on this point by a consideration of the distinction between a proposition (merely entertained)
and an assertion. Parallel distinctions might include those between a sentence and a statement, a possibility and an actuality,
a set of truth-conditions and their fulfilment, and between understanding and judging. Assertions say what reality is, but they do
not say that they do, (in Wittgenstein's phrase) they show that
they do. How people know that an assertion is being made is
not contained in the form of the proposition but derives from a
variety of complex circumstances. This is why Aquinas thinks
that saying God's essence is to exist does not prove God's existence even if it is true to say this. We do not know merely from
the meaning of the proposition itself if we are in a position to
assert it. On this point Burrell's agnosticism seems to mirror that
of Aquinas. But I think that Burrell almost forgets that Aquinas
does, in fact, make the identification of divine essence and divine
existence; in other words, Aquinas believes one can get to a position where one can assert this identity and thereby state a truth
about God. But one does not arrive at this position simply by a
consideration of the meaning of the proposition. We need to
look more closely at how Aquinas thinks we can attain the stance
of assertion vis-a-vis God.
In the next article of question 13 Aquinas claims that our predications do express something of the divine nature, albeit imperfectly. So he says at the end of the article:
In this life we cannot understand the essence of God as he is in himself; we can, however, understand it as it is represented by the perfections of his creatures.

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Aquinas believes that God, as the cause of perfections in creatures,
must in some way resemble those created perfections. Thus, God's
justice does not merely mean the cause of justice in the world,
whatever that might be. Rather, the cause of justice must resemble in some way created justice, and so on. The 'res significata' and the 'modus significandi' are causally related, and
causes resemble their effects. Where the ' res sigwificata' is divine, our way of speaking about it will depend on intelligible
forms drawn from sensory experience of composite entities (the
'modus significandi'). But Aquinas refuses to accept that there is
no resemblance between the First Cause and its effects. In the
reply at S.T. la, 13, 2 he explicitly rejects the idea that predication of God consists merely in saying that God is the cause of the
created quality signified by the predicate in question. The thesis
about cause-effect resemblance must be included. And in article
6 of the same question Aquinas states :
We have already shown that words of this sort [words used nonmetaphorically] do not only say how God is a cause, they also say
what he is.11
These claims by Aquinas suggest that Burrell's interpretation of
the prologue statement at S.T. la, 3 that we cannot know God's
essence might be excessively agnostic. However, Burrell can
claim that in question 3 Aquinas is not dealing with the divine
perfections like wisdom and justice but with absence of compositeness in God (for which there is no clear created analogue), and
what that implies. What seems clear from question 13, then, is
that Aquinas believes that we can in principle make a number of
true statements about God, although only a few of these will be
literally true. But is Aquinas als? making any ontological assertions about God in the earlier questions, particularly in question
3 ? I think he is.
For Aquinas, being is, absolutely speaking, prior to logic.12 It
is God's simple ontology which makes it true that language can11
l'2

"non solum dicuntur de Deo causaliter, sed etiam essentialiter."
S. T. la, 3, 1, and the 'sed contra' in la, 3, 5.

DIVINE SIMPLENESS

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not represent him to us adequately, but it does not mean the same,
any more than the fact that it is raining heavily means the same
as the fact that it is inadvisable to go out, although the former
fact may make it true that it is inadvisable to go out. There is
a logical connection between God's being simple and the inadequacy of our language about him, but in the order of reality divine simpleness precedes this connection in the order of logic.
And of course, Aquinas concedes-or rather argues-that we cannot know what it is like for God to be simple, but he is nevertheless convinced that such a God exists. He makes a judgment to
that effect, not only a preliminary act of understanding which
determines whether and how we can talk about the fact. So when
he says that God is simple, Aquinas does not mean that language
systematically fails to represent God adequately (he does say
this in question 13). Likewise, when Aquinas says that God is
not a body, he is making a factual claim; he is not just saying
that it is inappropriate to speak of God as bodily. Indeed, given
his obvious acceptance of the legitimacy of metaphorical language,
it is clearly not inappropriate on some occasions to speak as if
God is a body. Moreover, the interpretation of such language precisely as metaphorical depends upon taking the affirmation of divine simpleness (and hence, immateriality) as a metaphysical and
literal statement about God.
Two considerations, then, suggest to me that Burrell's exegesis
is not quite correct. One is that Aquinas, in question 3, is precisely concerned to make judgments and not simply to understand
possibilities, because he is asking what kind of reality he has
reasoned to in question 2. Only after he has made some headway
on that front does it become clear that special rules concerning
discourse in divinis are logically called for. If one had not already
decided that God is and must be simple, it would not make sense
to think that a special grammar for God-talk was in order. To
highlight this point it is important to notice how Aquinas comes
by the notion of divine simpleness in the t·ext. He does not simply
start off with a nominal definition to the effect that God, if he
exists, must be an absolutely simple reality. Rather, God's

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S.J.

simpleness is discovered precisely in the course of working
out the proofs of his existence using the general metaphysical
principles of actus and potentia. This is best illustrated in the
First Way, for Aquinas the via manifestior. I take that argument
to be saying something like this: given Aquinas's understanding
of change in general, something has to be actus purus if any
changes are to occur (which, manifestly, they do). But to be
actus purus is to be in no way composite, to be essentially and
absolutely simple. It is in the very process of arriving at the
judgment that there is an actus purus (albeit swiftly and at the
beginning of a massive compendium of theology) that its necessary simpleness becomes apparent. Perhaps Aquinas ought not
to call this reality ' God ' so quickly. But as it turns out, this
application is not unreasonable, for if it is in the very process and
goal of the rational judgments made in question 2 that the discovery is made implicitly that the Prime Mover is simple, the
later questions make clear the implication that these judgments
refer to an unique, infinite, immaterial, perfect and unchanging
reality.
Secondly, Aquinas reserves his treatment of how we can talk
about God until question 13. In question 3 he does not say that
he is carrying out a critical reflection about discourse to do with
God. He is engaged in that task only later, and when he is, he
says so explicitly. It is true that question 3 deals with God's
being by way of denying those manners of being which he is not.
But this is still a metaphysical, not a metalinguistic enterprise.
It appears, then, that Burrell's harshly linguistic concerns are
not fully consistent with Aquinas's actual train of thought. Certainly the moment of thought Burrell identifies and emphasizes
is there in Aquinas, but I think he has mislocated it. One feels
tempted to ask Burrell whether his interpretation of Aquinas
along the lines of a grammar in divinis also applies to the Five
Ways. Are they to be construed as necessary ways of thinking,
a la Kant, but devoid of any real bearing on the objective constitution of reality? On this view ' Prime Mover ', ' First
Cause ', ' Necessary Being ' are not definite descriptions picking

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out God but Ideas of Reason with a purely ' regulative ' function
for our minds. I do not know whether Burrell would accept this
line of thinking but I doubt very much if Aquinas would.
( 4) The philosophical question
Burrell and Mann are, of course, philosophizing in a very different context from that of Aquinas. Moreover, Mann's avowed
purpose is not so much to describe what he thinks Aquinas is
doing in S.T. la, 3, as to see whether what he is doing makes
philosophical sense. But implicit in that is an interpretation of
Aquinas's intentions, and I think that his interpretation is probably closer to those intentions than that of Burrell. There remains
the question of whether his interpretation is more fruitful in fact
from the philosophical point of view.
The vital step in question 3 is the identification of God's
essence with his existence. The difficulty for Aquinas is, then,
to explain how he still does not know what the essence of God is.
For if I know that God is his own existence, how can I still say
that I do not know what God is? It looks as though one is
claiming to know that p, while also claiming not to know what
p means, and this result appears absurd to many. It is to be
noted that statements which identify God's essence with his existence, or indeed, his wisdom with his justice, are different in kind
from utterances like ' God exists ' or ' God is wise ', since in
these latter cases one is grounding the statement in a consideration of the effects of God's causal activity and in a thesis about
causes resembling their effects. But there is no identity of essence
and existence in God's effects, and surely only accidental coincidence in some creatures of wisdom and justice. Hence, one is
tempted to think that the sentence' God's essence is identical with
his existence' is a merely nominal and stipulative definition. But
we have seen that Aquinas wants to deal in judgments about
reality-he will admit that if God exists, his essence and existence
are identical; but he already wants to insist that God does exist
in the Five Ways, and concludes on that basis that the identity
of God's essence and existence obtains in reality. We noted how

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the notion of divine simpleness is generated precisely (although
it is not fully explicitated) in the reasoning in question 2 that
leads to the affirmation of God's existence. But if this procedure
is sound, and presumably Aquinas thinks it is, why does he deny
himself (in the prologue to question 3) a knowledge of the divine essence ?
I think the answer to this problem goes something like this:
' Exists ' does not display the manner of relation between the
referent of the subject term and the fact of its existence. In this
respect, 'exists', if it is properly called a predicate at all (it is
surely a grammatical one), differs significantly from other predicates, as numerous philosophers have remarked. For while we
may know that something exists, we cannot know what it is to
exist (whereas we do know not only that some things are red,
but what it is to be red). One might say that we do not and
cannot know the ' essence ' of existence. If we did, Aquinas
seems to be saying, we would know God as he is in himselfwe would know what God is. Now in the case of the perfections
we attribute to God we know the meaning or sense of the words,
but not, Aquinas maintains, 13 the real essence that such words
primarily refer to, namely God. Hence we can know that God
really is F, G, or H, but not what it is for God to be F, G, or H.
As Gerard J. Hughes has noted, 14 we cannot spell out or 'unpack ' the resemblance that grounds our predications about God
in terms of some respect in which the resemblance holds, for we
do not know how to speak of that respect as it is instantiated in
God, the primary referent of the predication. But this inability
1a S. T.1a, 13, 6.
'14 "Aquinas and the Limits of Agnosticism," in The Philosophical Assessment of Theology, ed. G. J. Hughes (Tunbridge Wells, U.K. and Washington, DC: Search Press and Georgetown University Press, 1987), pp. 47-48.
I agree with Hughes that we cannot ' spell out ' in what respect there is a
resemblance, but perhaps we can refer to that (though not that respect) in
terms of which there is a resemblance, namely esse interpreted as actus (for
Burrell, a quintessentially analogous term). Esse is not a respect in terms of
which the resemblance can be stated, since it is beyond all classification. And
we cannot ' spell out ' esse because we simply do not know what it is, what its
' essence ' is. But we can refer to esse.

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in itself does not invalidate our predications. So far then,
Aquinas can make out a case for making judgments which can
be true even though the one judging is not in a position to know
the real essence referred to in the propositions he or she utters.
Analogously, we might allow that while one can know that God's
essence is identical with his existence, one cannot know what it is
for God's essence to be identical with his existence.
If this is allowed, then a ' doctrine ' approach will still be
philosophically tenable, for we will be dealing in judgments about
the ontological character of some reality, and not simply making
rules about the meaning of the term 'God'. We will be judging
the that, but not the what of God's esse. Still, the analogy is not
without difficulties, for to deal in unknowns like divine wisdom
on the basis of an inference from the experience of its imperfect
earthly analogue is one thing, but to identify unknowns like
God's essence and existence without benefit of an experientially
grounded analogue of such identity is another. It is true that
Aquinas works out his notion of divine simpleness, and therefore the identity of God's essence with his existence, in the process
of reasoning from judgments of empirical fact to a metaphysical
ground of those facts. And if that is so, the essence-existence
identity in God may well be legitimate in Aquinas's own terms.
But in Aquinas the terms are those of act-potency metaphysics;
it is that metaphysics, not the experientially grounded judgments
of change or causation as such, which generates the existential
affirmation of actus purus, and so generates the judgment that
the divinity is simple. What is important to recognize here is that
Aquinas's basic metaphysical assumptions play a role that is constitutive of the understanding he has of the starting points (such
as the general fact of change) of his arguments for the existence
of God as actus purus; and in that role they are not neutral with
respect to the question of God's simpleness. Thus there comes a
point when one's metaphysics is applied to reality in such an indeterminate and wide-ranging way that it starts to function as a
' grammatical ' key for interpreting all subsequent discourse
about reality. And the metaphysics of act and potency applied

16

PETER BURNS, S.J.

to the extremely general phenomenon of change with a view to
formulating a way of successfully referring to God is an exercise
at the limits of philosophical generality. In such a case the contribution of one's basic metaphysical presuppositions to a primary
characterization of the question to be decided is so determinative
of the conclusion that one can hardly speak of an
neutral truth. This in itself does not necessarily result in an
illusion, any more than grammar in the ordinary sense prevents
us from making true statements in a language. But not to recognize the logical import of one's metaphysical assumptions at the
beginning of an enterprise such as proving the existence of God
could lead one into an overly facile acceptance of ' facts about
God'. I think Burrell overestimates Aquinas's awareness of this
point.
The general metaphysical notions that Aquinas was working
with have of course been subject to a number of stiff treatments
as well as neglect in the subsequent history of philosophy. It
would be absurd to expect Aquinas to anticipate all relevant
philosophical developments after his own period. But Burrell's
interpretation along the lines of ' grammar in divinis ' enables
Aquinas's position to own up to the logical effects of its underlying metaphysical presuppositions. This need not mean that
logic is to substitute for metaphysics, nor that we can never do
more than formulate metalinguistic rules for how to talk about
reality, while bracketing the ontological significance of talk about
reality as such. But it helps to distinguish these two activities, as
Burrell's approach does. To that extent it helps Aquinas's position
to locate itself in terms of modern philosophy in a way that provides a bulwark against the more naive sorts of challenge on
offer. A logically self-aware Aquinas is a more formidable opponent to his modern critics, even if at the expense of a reduction
in metaphysical self-confidence (which is not to be confused with
the elimination or abandonment of metaphysics). But to pretend
that historically Aquinas was fully aware of the precise point
where metaphysics and ' grammar ' cross over is to be unnecessarily generous as well as anachronistic. If my reasoning on

DIVINE SIMPLENESS

IN SUMMA THEOLOGIAE

17

this point is correct, then Aquinas can only benefit from Burrell's
treatment in today's philosophical climate. If it is not, then both
Aquinas as a philosopher and Burrell as an exegete deserve more
credit than I suggest here.

II. The Function Of Divine Simpleness
( 1 ) I ts function in the text
We have earlier contrasted the way in which Aquinas derives
the notion of divine simpleness with a merely stipulative definition. In the latter approach, one would simply start off by defining any uncaused necessary reality as being absolutely noncomposite since one wants to rule out any kind of dependence on
components. If anything is an ontologically independent reality,
it will be simple. One would then employ a cosmological argument to try to demonstrate the existence of the independent reality. But Aquinas does not stipulate simpleness as a characteristic
of such a reality straightway. Instead he arrives at the judgment
about divine simpleness as a consequence of his arguments in
question 2; for given the validity of Aquinas's general metaphysical principles as these are applied to the occurrence of change,
or causation, or contingent beings, it is only if a reality which is
in no way potential and therefore implicitly simple exists, that
these occurrences can be explained.
When we surveyed Aquinas's remarks in question 3 we saw
that it is the denial of potentiality that commonly leads Aquinas
to deny bodiliness, composition of form and matter, or of essence
and existence, substance and accidents, or genus and difference
with respect to God. 15 It is instructive to note that whether God
is composed of actus and potenitia is not given a separate article.
That God is not so composed is already assumed to have been
shown in question 2.
It is God as actus purus and therefore absolutely simple that
implies his perfection in question 4 :
15 This is especially true in the second reply in article 1, the first reply in
article 2, the second reply in article 4, the first reply in article 6, the fourth
reply in article 7, and the third reply in article 8.

18

PETER BURNS,

S.J.

Thus, the first origin of all activity will be the most actual, and
therefore the most perfect, of all things. . . . The most perfect thing
of all is to exist, for everything else is potential compared to existence. Nothing achieves actuality except it exist, and the act of existing is therefore the ultimate actuality of everything, and even of
every form.16
In question 5 Aquinas identifies, at a fundamental level, existing
with being good, even though the expressions have different
senses. Again the crucial point concerns the ontological primacy
of actuality over against potentiality. Article 1 brings this out by
relating goodness to desirability, desirability to perfection, and
perfection to actuality, and the same point is rdterated at the beginning of the reply in article 3. With these and earlier considerations in mind, it is clear that God must be good, as Aquinas
goes on to state in question 6. The absence of genus-difference
composition in God is used to show that God is supremely good
in article 2, and the absence of substance-accidents composition is
used to show that God is good by nature in article 3. In question
7 the absence of matter-form composition is employed to argue
for God's limitlessness, and the absence of essence-existence composition is used to claim that other realities cannot be limitless in
the same way. God, being ipsum esse subsistens, is as such
uniquely limitless. In question 8, article 4, God's omnipresence is
specially characterized because of its wholeness; there is no question of part of God being present in one place but not in others.
In question 9 the denial of potentiality in God entails his immutability. Aquinas says explicitly:

Things in change are therefore always composite [but since God is]
altogether simple.... he cannot ichange.17
And since there always exists potentiality in creatures, God alone
is altogether unchangeable, not being composed of substance and
accidents (and therefore able to lose or acquire new qualities),
nor of essence and existence (and therefore able to come to be or
1s S. T. la, 4, 1.
17 S. T. la, 9, 1.

DIVINE SIMPLENESS

IN SUMMA THEOLOGIAE

19

cease to be). And this absolute unchangeability entails God's
timelessness given the analysis Aquinas offers of time in terms
of change. Finally in question 11, article 3, Aquinas appeals to
God's simpleness to show that there cannot be more than one
God. If God's nature is identical with his existence then "to be
God is to be this God ". 18 And God is supremely one because he
is not divided in any way but is absolutely simple.19
The denial of compositeness in God is, then, a crucial feature
running through Aquinas's r·easoning in questions 4 through 11.
Of course, Aquinas does employ other arguments from time to
time to back up his conclusions in these questions, and he tackles
secondary questions in various articles. Nonetheless, simpleness
is the ontological condition and primary reason for asserting that
the reality whose existence is affirmed in question 2 is perfect,
good, limitless, immutable, timeless, and one. In this light, to
call that reality ' God ' is not unreasonable. As such, simpleness
is not merely an attribute (albeit drawn in negative terms) among
others. The relationship between question 3 and the rest is not
coincidental but determinative. This point is sometimes missed by
commentators. The negative attributes discussed in these questions are really ways of elaborating what is involved in being
'omnino simplex'. In a sense, we are not really being told anything more than we were told in questions 2 and 3, or even question 2 taken alone. In this respect, Burrell does deliver a valuable
insight in speaking of a logic proper to discourse about God.
Logically, a reality that was not absolutely simple would not be
the other things either. But Aquinas's aim is not just to show
this, but also to give reasons for believing that it really is God
whose existence he has shown in question 2. We are still being
presented with a series of ontological judgments in these questions because otherwise we might think that the question of God's
existence had not really been settled in question 2. We might
realize what negative attributes must be true of actus purus, and
so fail to recognize its divine character.
1s S. T. la, 11, 3.
19

S. T. la, 11, 4.

20

PETER BURNS,

S.J.

(2) Divine simpleness and cosmological arguments

It is with this thought in mind that I turn now to the relationship of divine simpleness to Aquinas's 'proofs' of the existence
of God and similarly constructed arguments. It is often claimed
that even if the Five Ways are valid, they do not prove the existence of God, but at best only the existence of some reality that
may or may not be identical with the referent of the term ' God'
as it is used by religious believers. Sometimes even the possibility
of this identity is denied, not infrequently by religious believers
themselves. But as we have seen, if the Five Ways prove the
existence of an absolutely simple reality which in virtue of that
absolute simpleness is immaterial, perfect, good, infinite, immutable, timeless, and one, it does not seem unreasonable to give
the name 'God' to that reality. The fact that a host of other,
metaphorical predications may be invoked by religious believers
to talk of the same reality, and that these predications may be
more meaningful religiously than the (negative) predications discussed in questions 3 through 11 does not necessarily imply that
the God referred to in those questions and under those referring
descriptions (' the God of classical theism ') will not turn out to
be one and the same as the God ref erred to by the more religiously evocative language of Scripture (' the God of Christian faith'),
A social security number may successfully pick out the human being who is my sister, even if I do not normally refer to or think
of her as the person so picked out.
As the text stands, however, the objection is plausible, Aquinas
introduces the name ' God ' before he spells out the simpleness of
the reality in question, and all that that means, But that early
introduction of the name should not deflect us from considering
soberly whether the name should not indeed be applied after alL
If Aquinas has gotten things a little back to front, that should
not stop us from asking whether they are the right things. Moreover, the notion of simpleness is, I contend, implicitly present in
the First Way. For it is there that the denial of potentiality in
the Prime Mover is first charted. Given actus purus, simpleness
and the other divine attributes seem to follow. If Aquinas had

DIVINE SIMPLENESS

IN SUMMA THEOLOGIAE

21

started with a nominal definition of ' God ' as conceptually entailing the notion of absolute simpleness, and had then proceeded
to instantiate that concept by a cosmological argument, things
might have been clearer. But there is something forceful and attractive in generating the judgment of absolute simpleness in the
course of the argument itself. For if the argument works, it
works as a unity. And one avoids the criticism of already starting from a concept of God, a criticism often leveled against a
prioristic arguments for his existence. Aquinas's argument instead is genuinely from empirical fact. Of course, some concepts
are there from the start, as they must be in any argument. Burrell's point about' grammar' is a fair one in this connection. But
the crucial concepts are general and metaphysical in this part of
Aquinas's enterprise, not specific and religious. They involve the
analysis of change in terms of act and potency. If these metaphysical principles conjoined with the empirical fact of change
generate the conclusion that there exists a reality totally without
potentiality and, therefore, without composition of any kind, and
this fits well with the claims of theistic believers, to talk of
smuggling God into the argument seems out of place. Any other
argument exhibited in a deductive form will be open to an analogous charge, but it is surely a trivial one. To say otherwise is
to rule out a priori the possibility of a deductive proof of God's
existence. The fact that Aquinas does not make his every philosophical presupposition explicit in the text is not damning of
his arguments, even if as we saw earlier, it would have been
better for Aquinas to have been aware of the logical effects of
those presuppositions.
If one were to reconstruct what is going on in this part of the
Summa, one would see that the notion of simpleness plays an
indispensable role in the endeavour as a whole. Cosmological
arguments which take their inspiration from Aquinas would, one
suspects, do well to highlight this function of simpleness. This
is not the place to do a full-scale analysis and evaluation of such
arguments. But it does seem to me that a crucial step is going
to have to involve the notion of simpleness as a necessary char-

22

PETER BURNS, S.J.

acteristic of whatever is proved to exist as the ontological ground
of change, causality, dependent beings, etc. Since it seems plausible on inspection to suppose that the universe and any particular
objects it contains are all composite, then the conclusion of such
an argument would appear reasonably to refer to what is transcendent.
( 3) Some modern critical treatments of
cosmological arguments
In my view most modern critics of Aquinas's Five Ways and
similar arguments tend to neglect the vital role that simpleness
plays therein. Their usual strategy is to concede provisionally
that the cosmological arguments under review might yield a necessary reality, one which is factually incapable of not existing and
upon which all other things depend for their existence. But they
maintain that there is no reason to identify this reality with God.
In John Hick's Arguments for the Existence of God 20 he
analyzes cosmological arguments in terms of a search for explanatory ultimacy. While he points to the mental rather than the ma_terial realm as the realm to which people may naturally be led
in their search for this ultimacy, he concludes that there is no
decisive reason for positing God rather than the material universe
as this explanatory ultimate:
Now as de facto ultimates, God and the physical universe enjoy
equal status.21 • • • There is no adequate reason to do other than
accept the universe as simply an ultimate inexplicable datum. For
whilst the cosmologicalargument presents us with the options : universe as brute fact or as divine creation, it does not provide any
ground for preferring one to the other.22
Considering that Hick tries in this book to give an account of
Aquinas's views on this subject, it seems a serious error to omit
all mention of the grounds that Aquinas certainly advances for
preferring the theistic alternative, namely, the complete absence
20 John Hick, Arguments for the E:ristence of God (London: Macmillan,
1970).
21 Hick, Arguments, p •. 48.
2 :1 Ibid., p. 51.

DIVINE SIMPLENESS

IN SUMMA THEOLOGIAE

23

of compositeness in God, and the irreducibly composite character
of the physical universe. For Aquinas, the universe just does not
have what it takes to be the requisite explanatory ultimate-absolute simpleness. Aquinas might be wrong about his reasons
for holding this view, but at least they should be given a hearing.
In ]. L. Mackie's book, The Miracle of Theisni, 23 he allows
that a plausible argument can be constructed in which a relation
of dependence leads us to posit a reality whose existence depends
on nothing else. But he counters the theist thus :
We have no reason for accepting this implicit assumption [that the
reality which ends the regress is God]. Why, for example, might
there not be a permanent stock of matter whose essence does not
involve existence but whkh did not derive its existence from anything else ? ·24
Now Aquinas did not mean by 'matter' the same as Mackie.
In Aquinas's terms, matter is purely potential as such, and this
means that uninformed matter would not be anything actual at
all. If Aquinas had understood the modern notion of matter, he
may have allowed it actuality, but he would have applied to this
alternative to God as to any other an analysis that would have
revealed it as metaphysically composed of act and potency, and
therefore as incapable of halting the regress of dependence. On
the one hand, then, the purely potential cannot be ultimate in the
order of reality, and on the other, non-dependence implies noncompositeness. Aquinas has his reasons, therefore, for preferring
God to matter, and they derive from a metaphysics of act and
potency which shows the need for an ontologically simple reality
to ground all composite realities. But Mackie has failed to address himself to the function of divine simpleness in Aquinas's
argument.
In a more recent article, 25 Martin Lee wonders why the world
needs to be thought of as contingent. He argues :
23

J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford University Press, 1982).

Mackie, Miracle, p. 91.
Lee, " Something Rather Than Nothing," H eythrop l ournal, vol.
XXVII, no. 2 (April, 1986), pp. 141-154.
24

25 Martin

PETER BURNS,

S.J.

Any theory of the universe that posits some fundamental stuff or
other (for example, energy) will support the . . . claim that the
world is not contingent. 26 ••• There is still no reason to pass from
the undoubted dependence of the individual objects of the universe
to the conclusion that the world is itself dependent. 21

In these quotations ' contingent ' differs from ' dependent ' in that
it means being capable of coming into and going out of existence,
whereas something can be dependent fo:r its existence on something else without being contingent in this sense. Lee advances
the conclusion that ' We should rest with the view that the world
has a necessity through itself '. 28 He does not consider the crucial
belief of Aquinas that only an absolutely simple reality can have
this per se necessity or' aseity '. For Aquinas anything composite
depends on its components. If it seems reasonable to suppose that
the world as a whole, its basic stock of ' energy,' and its individual
objects are composite realities, they cannot on Aquinas's account
provide the per se necessity Lee thinks they can. To neglect this
aspect of the thought of such an important and influential proponent of cosmological arguments as Aquinas is inevitably to devalue criticism aimed in his direction.
One modern proponent of the cosmological argument is Richard Swinburne. 29 His basic argument differs from that of
Aquinas in being inductive. Swinburne does talk of simplicity as
having an important role in his argument, but he is not really
dealing with the simpleness of divine being. He notes that
Leibniz claimed that the universe is not metaphysically necessary
and therefore that its existence needs explanation. He continues:
He [Leibniz] may be right, but I cannot see how you can argue for
this claim except in terms of the relatively greater simplicity and
explanatory power of a potential explanans [such as God]. 30
2s Lee " Something," p. 149.
21 Ibid.,
28 Ibid.,

p. 150.
p. 151.

29 Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford:
1979).
ao Swinburne, God, p. 126.

Clarendon Press,

DIVINE SIMPLENESS

IN SUMMA THEOLOGIAE

25

The simplicity Swinburne seems to have in mind here is primarily
that of theism as an explanatory hypothesis over against the relatively complex hypothesis of an otherwise unexplained and complicated physical universe existing as a brute fact. He does, it is
true, maintain that the universe has a vast complexity as compared with God's existence.31 Occasionally he seems to shift from
talking about the relative simplicity of God's existence as an explanatory hypothesis to appealing to the ontological simpleness of
God as that which makes the theistic hypothesis the simpler of
the two. But in general his interests are in epistemological considerations and analogies with what he calls personal explanations,
not in a rigorous denial of compositeness in God. For example,
he is much less cautious than Aquinas in describing God in personal terms, and he assumes too easily, I suspect, that if God is
ontologically less complex than a complicated physical universe,
then the concept of God is a simpler one from the point of view
of probability theory than the concept of a complex universe existing as a brute fact. The implication appears to be that the concept of God is somehow easier for the understanding to grasp (on
an analogy between God and a finite mind) than the concept of
a complex universe, and that therefore it provides us with a simpler hypothesis. I think we have seen enough to realize that this
implication is of doubtful validity. What makes the concept of
God so difficult is precisely bound up with the idea that God is
absolutely simple. The initial probability of this concept being
instantiated in reality must appear rather low both in terms of
empirical observation, and in terms of our subjective understanding of what it might be like to be absolutely simple. As Aquinas
is at pains to point out, we cannot properly understand or describe the divine reality because language is systematically inadequate for speaking of what is absolutely simple. Nevertheless,
Aquinas also tells us, we are right to take a simple reality over a
composite one as the preferable ultimate explanans, but for reasons
that have more to do with metaphysics than probability theory.
It may be objected that none of the foregoing rebuts the argu3 1 Ibid.,

p. 130.

26

PETER BURNS,

S.J.

ments of those such as Hick, Mackie, and Lee, who regard cosmological arguments as doomed to failure. But I have not been
arguing that their conclusions are, in the end, false. I have simply
been concerned to show that to fail to present a vital and rich
feature of Aquinas's position on such arguments is to criticize in
a seriously inadequate and misleading way. I have little doubt
that rejoinders to the full mode of argument would not be slow
in being proferred, and I make no claim here that these rejoinders
would inevitably fail. Defenders of cosmological arguments may
also refine and develop the way in which divine simpleness can
function in such arguments in ways that go beyond what was
achieved by Aquinas. What is at stake is not only the validity
of the steps in such maneuvers, but the value, consistency, explanatory power, and persuasiveness of the underlying metaphysics, especially the metaphysics of actus and potentia. It is
true of course that this kind of metaphysics has been attacked independently of the case for theism. And it is true that Anthony
Kenny does criticize facets of Aquinas's metaphysics in his analysis of the Five Ways. 32 Partly because Kenny's criticisms seem
to me to be based on misunderstandings, and partly because other
modern critics have neglected the role that simpleness has in
Aquinas's arguments, I would maintain that a more profound
and systematic study of cosmological arguments that includes the
role of simpleness is called for by those at home with both
Thomistic and modern analytical philosophy of religion. The importance of the question of the existence of God, and the value of
understanding correctly Aquinas's contribution to that question,
require and merit nothing less.

H Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1%9).

BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD IN
RECENT CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY
}EAN PORTER

0

University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana

NE OF THE MOST striking features of Catholic
moral theology since Vatican II has been the reluctance
of so many moral theologians, on all sides of the controversies which have characterized that discipline, to offer a substantive account of goodness and the human good as a basis for
understanding the moral life. There has been an extensive discussion of human goods (plural) and their relation to moral obligation, but no one, to my knowledge, has attempted to ground
that discussion systematically in a substantive account of what it
means to live a good human life which would precede and justify
the identification of some goods as true or basic human goods.
To the contrary, a number of the most influential moral theologians, led by Germain Grisez and John Finnis, insist that our
knowledge of moral obligation cannot be based on any such general metaphysical or anthropological theory. Instead, they hold
that morality is grounded in our recognition of certain basic
goods, which are self-evident to us.
My purpose in this essay is to examine the claim that some
basic goods are self-evidently such to us. I will argue that Grisez
and Finnis have not made a convincing case that there are selfevident basic goods. Moreover, I will argue that, to the extent
that defenders of proportionalism do not challenge the GrisezFinnis account of basic goods, their alternative theories of morality are vitiated as well. I will conclude that the current debate in
Catholic moral theology concerning the foundations of moral obligation might more fruitfully be cast as a debate over rival ac-

27

28

JEAN PORTER

counts of the human good, than as a debate over the moral significance of particular goods.

The Grisez/Finnis account of basic goods
In order to understand the point of the account of self-evident
basic goods developed by Grisez and Finnis, it will be necessary
to see how this account functions in the context of their overall
theory of morality.• This theory of morality begins with a general account of practical reason, which is then narrowed down
into a theory of moral action, interpreted as action that is rational in the fullest possible sense. That is, this theory begins
with the observation that all rational agents act in order to obtain or to preserve something that seems to be good, at least to
that agent. But even the most rational agent can be mistaken
as to whether this concrete desideratum is truly good, and in such
a case the action is likely to be self-frustrating or even harmful
to the agent (to say nothing of its consequences for others).
Hence, the exigencies of practical reason itself, prior to the introduction of any properly moral consideration, force us to ask
whether the seeming goods for which we act are true goods.
And how are we to distinguish between true and seeming goods?
Grisez and Finnis reply that the (true) good in its most general
sense must be understood as that which is desirable, not only for
this or that individual or in these special circumstances, but desirable per se, for every individual and in all situations.
So far, this line of analysis will be familiar to anyone acquainted
with scholastic philosophy. But at the next stage of the argu1 In my summary of the theory of morality put forth by Grisez and Finnis,
I have relied primarily on the following works: John Finnis, Natural Law and
Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Germain Grisez, The Way
of the Lord Jesus, Volume One: Christian Moral Principles (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983); and Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John
Finnis, "Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends," The American Journal of Jurisprudence, 32 (1987), 99-151. The latter essay presents
a summary of their theory including a detailed commentary on the earlier
works through which it was developed, as well as responses to critics, and
may be said to be the definitive statement of the Grisez/Finnis theory of
morality up to now.

BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD

29

ment, the originality of the Grisez/Finnis theory of morality becomes clear. How do we know what counts as a true human
good, that is, how do we determine which among the possible
objects of human desire (if any!) is intrinsically desirable for
any rational agent? Grisez and Finnis respond that the true
human goods are
such to us. Our knowledge of
them is not derived from our knowledge of the natural world,
nor does it depend on a particular philosophical/theological
framework. This answer is not meant to imply that this knowledge is innate, in the sense that it would be present to us apart
from any sort of experience whatever; the babe in the cradle does
not grasp the self-evidence of these goods. However, once we
have some experience of the basic goods, have felt their attractive
power, so to speak, then it becomes evident to us that these goods
are desirable in and of themselves :
[The basic human goods] are not inferred from facts. They are not
inferred from metaphysical propositions about human nature, or
about the nature of good and evil, or about ' the function of a human
being', nor are they inferred from a teleological conception of nature, or any other conception of nature. They are not inferred or
derived from anything. They are underived (though not innate).
Principles of right and wrong, too, are derived from these first, premoral principles of practical reasonableness, and not from any facts,
whether metaphysical or otherwise.2
Specifically, there are seven basic human goods, of which the
first three are substantive (they exist prior to our choices) and
the rest are reflexive (they depend on our choices) : human life
(including health and procreation), knowledge and aesthetic appreciation, skilled performances of all kinds, self-integration, authenticity /practical reasonableness, justice and friendship, and
religion/holiness. 3
The first principle of practical reasoning (FPPR), "Good is
2 Finnis, Natural Law, 33-34.

a The list of basic goods is taken from Grisez, Way, 124, and Grisez, Boyle
and Finnis, "Practical .. .," 107-108. Finnis's earlier list is somewhat different,
but not, in my opinion, fundamentally so; see Finnis, Natural Law, 86-90.

30

JEAN PORTER

to be done and evil is to be avoided," is similarly self-evident to
anyone who has experienced any sort of desire.4 Moreover, it is
prior to any other deliverances of practical reasoning, since it is
the foundation for them all. Indeed, an item of behavior that did
not stem out of the FPPR would not count as a human action at
all. That is, a putative action must be intelligible in terms of the
agent's intentions in order to count as a true action; we must be
able to describe it in such a way as to indicate what good the
agent hopes to secure or preserve by behaving as she does. Of
course, Grisez and Finnis are not claiming that our knowledge
of the FPPR depends on the mastery of a philosophical theory of
action (which could hardly be self-evident) ; their point is rather
that what we mean by calling an item of behavior an action is
that it is consciously directed towards some good. Moreover, it is
clear that this notion of action is closely connected to the claim
that there are seven fundamental human goods. These are such
precisely because they provide an intelligible reason for action
for any rational agent; whenever we ask, " Why are you doing
that ? " the answer, "To obtain knowledge" (or one of the other
six basic goods), is always sufficient to render the action intelligible. Correlatively, all actions intend one or more of the basic
goods in some way; whatever good the agent intends in a specific
case will always be found on examination to be a means to, or an
aspect of, some basic good ( s). That is, any action that is truly
such will always be aimed, directly or indirectly, at obtaining or
holding onto one or more of the basic goods.
Hence-and this is critically important for Grisez and Finnispractical reason is different in kind from speculative reason, and
practical/moral truths are different in kind from speculative
truths. Practical reason proceeds from starting points that are
wholly independent of speculative knowledge and reasoning, and
its truths correspond to what ought to be (in a sens·e of " ought "
that is not necessarily moral), rather than to what is. Grisez
and Finnis insist on this point, because they accept the familiar
argument that no moral (or more generally, practical) conclusions
'Grisez, Way, 178.

BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD

31

can be drawn from purely factual premises alone. This is taken
to be a deliverance of elementary logic, which teaches us that
nothing can appear in the conclusion of an argument that is not
somehow implicit in its premises; specifically, statements about
the way things are cannot yield any conclusions about the way
things ought to be.5 To this general point, they add the more
specific argument that morality is not concerned with human life
and nature as they exist here and now, since after all, what already exists cannot be brought about by any action. Morality
concerns what we will bring about in the future, and the future
of human life is open-ended; we cannot say either what it will
be, or what it should be, on the basis of what we know it to be
now. Of course, once practical reason turns to the task of discerning how to bring about what is to be, it necessarily takes
factual truths into account, since these set the means and limits
of our action. But factual truths never play more than this secondary role in practical reasoning, just as truths about the way
things should be do not determine the way things are, except insofar as existing conditions reflect our previous attempts to act
rationally and morally.
If the FPPR expresses what is essential to human action as
such, then how is it possible to move from this principle to specifically moral reasoning? Once again, Grisez and Finnis appeal
to a scholastic dictum, interpreted however in a distinctive way:
a moral action is rational in the fullest sense, whereas an immoral
action is irrational in some respects, although it retains sufficient
rationality still to count as an action. And what does it mean for
an action to be irrational/immoral in this way? As we would expect, this question must be answered in terms of the account of
basic goods outlined above. We have already observed that a
putative action is truly such only if it is aimed (directly or indirectly) at securing one (or more) of the seven basic human
goods. But because each of these basic goods is immediately self6 This general contention has been challenged by logicians and moral phillosophers; for example, see Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 56-58.

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JEAN PORTER

evident, they are incommensurable and stand in no intrinsic order
to one another. Hence, an action that aims at one basic good
while arbitrarily slighting others is irrational to the extent that
it turns from a basic good without adequate reason, even though
it retains sufficient rational intelligibility to count as an action.
Admittedly, we cannot aim at all the basic goods all the time;
but we can act in such a way as to remain open to those basic
goods that we do not actively pursue in a given action. Only
in this way will our action be fully rational, that is to say, morally good. Hence, the first principle of morality (FPM) is, "In
voluntarily acting for human goods and avoiding what is opposed to them, one ought to choose and otherwise will those and
only those possibilities whose willing is compatible with a will
towards integral human fulfillment." 6
At this point, it would seem that a new component has been
added to the Grisez/Finnis theory of morality. It would be natural to assume that the " integral human fulfillment" to which the
FPM refers is some determinate ideal of human existence, supervening over the attainment of the basic goods and placing them
in some sort of order. But Grisez in particular is very careful to
ensure that we do not understand integral human fulfillment in
this way. 7 Any such determinate ideal of human life would be
static and limiting, in his view, since the future condition of the
human person cannot possibly be predicted. Hence, this concept
of integral human fulfillment, as far as it goes, is wholly dependent on the account of the basic human goods. That is, integral human fulfillment is nothing other than the complete enjoyment of all the basic human goods; what that would look like
in practice cannot be determined, since the basic goods are openended and transcend their specific instantiations. Clearly, we will
never achieve integral human fulfillment by our own efforts, but
a truly moral will is one that is directed towards it nonetheless,
as a rational ideal.
s Grisez, Way, 184.
7 Grisez, Way, 222-224; compare Grisez, Boyle and Finnis, " Practical. .. ,"
117-119.

BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD

33

The FPM is further explicated by means of what Grisez refers
to as eight modes of responsibility, which are simply specifications
of the FPM : " Each mode of responsibility simply excludes a
particular way in which a person can limit himself or herself to
a quite partial and inadequate fulfillment." 8 To quote Grisez's
helpful summary of the modes:
1. One should not be de·terred by felt inertia from acting for intelligible goods. This happens when one refrains from doing something
worthwhile out of laziness, conquerable depression, or the like ...
2. One should not be pressed by enthusiasm or impatience to act individualistically for intelligible goods. This happens when one acts
by oneself, although knowing that by cooperation with others the
good would be more perfectly attained insofar as others could share
in it ...
3. One should not choose to satisfy an emotional desire except as
part of one's pursuit and/ or attainment of an intelligible good other
than the satisfaction of the de·sire itself. Violations occur when people
act for no good reason, on account of impulse, craving, routine, or the
continued lure of goals which no longer make sense ...
4. One should not choose to act out of an emotional aversion except as part of one's avoidance of some• intelligible evil other than
the inner tension experienced in enduring that aversion. This happens when one is deterred from reasonable action by feelings of repugnance, fear of pain, anxiety, and so forth ...
5. One should not, in response to different feelings toward different
persons, willingly proceed with a preference for anyone unless the
preference is required by intelligible goods themselves ... This mode
is violated when one's treatment of others is marked by partiality
toward some (including partiality towards oneself) ...
6. One should not choose on the basis of emotions which bear upon
empirical aspects of intelligible goods (or bads) in a way which interferes with a niore perfect sharing in the good or avoidance of the
bad. This happens when people act for the conscious experience of
a good rather than the reality . . .
7. One should not be moved by hostility to freely accept or choose
the destruction, danwge, arr inipeding of any intelligible good. Violations occur when negative feelings cause people to act destructively
(including self-destructively) ...
s Grisez, FV ay, 191.

JEAN PORTER

R One should not be move:d by a stronger desire for one instance of
an intelligible good to act for it by choosing to destroy, damage, or
impede some other instance of an intelligible good. This happens

when one deliberately acts to bring about something bad, either for
the sake of a good or to prevent something else bad ... 9
Because each of the modes of responsibility is a specification
of one fundamental principle, they are equally self-evident and

equally important. However, as Russell Rittinger observes, the
seventh and eighth modes most dearly indicate the distinctiveness
of the Grisez/Finnis theory. 10 Although Grisez and Finnis later
refine the way in which they express it, the general idea conveyed by these prohibitions is summed up in their early statements
that we are never morally justified in acting against a basic good. 11
Hence, these theorists reaffirm the traditional view that there are
some acts that can never be morally justified, but are intrinsically
morally evil-namely, they add, those actions that involve direct
attacks on some basic good, for example, direct homicide, deliberate contraception, lying, or adultery.
So far, the analysis of morality offered by Grisez and Finnis
would seem to be unassailable. The claim that there are certain
basic goods which are self-evidently such appears at first reading
to be persuasive, and the conclusions for morality that they draw
from this insight would seem to follow inevitably from their account of the basic goods. After all, who could justify a choice
that is directed against a basic good? But on closer examination
serious problems with this analysis of moral obligation begin to
emerge.
What are the basic goods!
Recall what we have been told so far : There are certain basic,
equally irreducible human goods, which always provide a reason
for action, and against which a rational person will never act
directly; moreover, all this is self-evidently true. We should not
e Grim:, Way, 225-226.
Russell Rittinger, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Notre
Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 59.
11 See Grisez,
227, footnote Z, for a later comment on these statements.
10

BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN

GOOD

35

expect to be given much of an argument for self-evident truths,
and initially, at least, we do not get one. What we get are dialectical considerations that are meant to help us to uncover what
we already know implicitly; for example, " ... any sane person is
capable of seeing that life, knowledge, fellowship, offspring, and a
few other such basic aspects of human existence are, as such,
good, i.e worth having, leaving to one side all particular predicaments and implications, all assessment of relative importance, all
moral demands, and in short, all questions of whether and how
one is to devote oneself to these goods." 12
In other words, the process of reflection that we are being invited to undertake would go somewhat as follows : Consider any
action that you like, say for example your action in reading this
article. Now suppose you are asked why you are doing that.
Whatever the details of your answer, it will almost certainly
amount to this, that you suspect that the author may have something enlightening to say. In other words, your action is ultimately directed towards the good of knowledge. Admittedly, you may
not be acting in a given case in order to secure the good that
might at first be supposed to motivate your action. Suppose, to
continue with the preceding example, that you are certain that this
author is a fool who can have nothing helpful to say, but you are
an editor, and it is unfortunately part of your job to read this
dreadful essay. Even then, it is argued, your reason for acting
would reduce to one of the basic goods. In this case, you would
be acting, ultimately, for the good of life, since you must do your
job in order to earn the salary that you need in order to live. In
short, the argument concludes, if we reflect upon the sorts of reasons that persons give for their actions, we will be led ineluctably
to acknowledge the self-evident moral force of the basic goods
towards which those reasons point.
This line of analysis is plausible because it presupposes the fact,
which I think no one would deny, that there are certain states of
affairs that almost everyone would agree upon as being prima
12 Finnts,
Natural Law, 30; compare Grisez, Boyle and Finnis, " Practical ... " 113.

36

JEAN PORTER

facie desirable. That is, almost everyone would agree that, all

other things being equal, it is better to be alive than dead, knowledgeable rather than ignorant, and so on. If Grisez and Finnis
simply concluded from this fact that there are certain broad
classes of generally acknowledged goods, which are of significance
for moral reflection, then their analysis would be unassailable.
But of course they go well beyond this fundamental observation
to assert that seven of these generally acknowledged goods are in
fact self-evidently basic, irreducible, and desirable in all circumstances. Furthermore, they take it to be self-evident that it is always irrational, and therefore immoral, to act in such a way as to
destroy or directly impede an instance of one of these goods. And
it is at these points that their analysis falters.
In the first place, neither of these claims follows from the general observations about the sorts of reasons that are offered as
explanations for actions, on which Grisez and Finnis could claim
to have identified at least a wide area of agreement. Even if we
grant that most human actions can be explained in terms of the
agent's efforts to attain or preserve some one of a few generally
acknowledged goods, it does not follow that every action must be
explained in terms of these goods in order to be intelligible or rational. Much less does it follow that these goods are basic goods
in the Grisez/Finnis sense, that is, distinct and mutually underived. Furthermore, even if we did grant that there are seven
and only seven basic, underived goods towards which all rational
action is necessarily aimed (directly or indirectly), it still would
not follow that it is necessarily irrational to act in such a way as
to damage or impede an instance of one of these goods, ·even if
that were the only way in which it would be possible to avert the
destruction of another instance of a basic good.
But of course, Grisez and Finnis do not intend to offer arguments for these claims. To do so would be self-defeating, since
in their view these claims are self-evident and therefore neither
need nor admit of arguments in their defense. But as a matter of
fact, these claims simply are not self-evident, at least not in the
sense that there is some obvious absurdity or self-contradiction

BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD

37

involved in their denial. Of course, Grisez and Finnis could respond by claiming that anyone who does not grasp the reality
and moral force of the basic goods is either not sufficiently reflective, or not too bright, or else morally corrupt. But such a move
is bound to be unsatisfactory, at least to anyone who is not already convinced by the account of morality developed by Grisez
and Finnis, if only because this sort of argument could be used
to justify any moral claim that strikes anyone with sufficient force
to seem to her or him to be self-evidently compelling. It may well
be self-evident to someone (as it seems to have been to G. E.
Moore) that love and beauty are the only intrinsically desirable
aims for action, and therefore, one is morally obliged to promote
these aims as far as possible. 13 It might even be said that anyone
who does not grasp the moral force of love and beauty is hopelessly dull or corrupt, and therefore unqualified to participate in
moral discourse at all. But neither Grisez and Finnis, nor a good
many others, would agree with these assertions, and there is no
reason why they should, at least not without arguments of some
kind. The same may be said about Grisez's and Finnis's own system, and for this reason it is not surprising that they do resort
to arguments at some points in their analysis, as we will observe
later on.
At any rate, there is a more fundamental difficulty with the
move that Grisez and Finnis make, from a consideration of generally agreed upon desiderata, to a list of basic goods. That is, it is
not clear just what these basic goods are supposed to be, or to put
it another way, what their ontological/logical status is. Grisez
and Finnis tend to speak as if they have an independent existence,
distinct from the individuals and states of affairs to which they
are somehow tethered, in virtue of which they command our respect and demand our protection. 14 That is why they tend to
is G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
I 903) , 183-224.
14 This hypostatization of the basic goods is evident throughout the writings
of Grisez and Finnis and their collaborators. For example, see Grisez, Way,
122: " Basic human goods are thus greater than the particular things people

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JEAN PORTER

speak in terms of attacking an instance of the basic good of life, for
example, rather than in terms of harming someone by killing him,
and that is also why they adopt the fantastic position that there is
no essential difference between the anti-life will of a murderer
(who attacks life by killing someone) and that of a couple who
use contraceptives (thereby attacking life by preventing conception) .15 It may well be the case that there is some independent
reality that undergirds our use of universals like "life "-independent, that is, of the fact that we happen to group a number of
disparate particular states of affairs together under this name.
But one need not be a nominalist in order to question whether it
makes sense to speak of hypostatized basic goods as Finnis and
Grisez seem to do. I know of no theory of universals according to
which it makes sense to speak of universals, or the realities that
undergird these universals, as being themselves potential objects
of actions, in terms of which, therefore, we could make sense of
the language of attacking basic goods.
It might be objected that what Grisez and Finnis say is that
we can never act in such a way as to destroy an instance of a basic
good, and this does not imply that the basic goods themselves are
potential objects of action. But in that case it is difficult to see
the point of the language of basic goods. It may be that the claim
that we ought never to destroy or impede an instance of a basic
good is nothing more than a short-hand way of saying that we
must never act in ways that are harmful and destructive. If that
do to participate in them." A second example: " It is true that contraception
does no injustice to the possible person whose life it prevents. But it does not
follow that contraception is morally acceptable. For homicide is wrong not
only because it involves an injustice, but also because it carries out a nonrationally grounded, contralife will-a will that the one killed not be.... Thus,
even if contraception does no injustice to anyone, it is wrong because it necessarily involves a nonrationally grounded, contralife will-the same sort of will
which also is essential to the wrongness of deliberate suicide and homocide in
general." Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, John Finnis and William E. May,
" ' Every Marital Act Ought to Be Open to New Life:' Towards a Clearer
Understanding," The Thomist 52.3: 365-426, at 385. (Italics mine). Rittinger
also remarks on the tendency in Grisez et al to hypostatize the basic goods at
72 and 77.
is Again, see " ' Every Marital Act ... " 385.

BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD

39

is so, then Grisez and Finnis open themselves up to the argument
that an act of, for example, killing, need not be harmful or destructive in any obvious way, or else it may be the only way to
avert still more grievous harms. Clearly, they have cast their
moral analysis in terms of norms of respect for basic goods rather
than in terms of prohibitions of harmful actions precisely in order
to block these sorts of arguments. But without some account of
what the basic goods are, it is difficult to escape the suspicion that
the appeal to basic goods is finally nothing other than a device by
which to block consequentialist arguments without actually answering them.
Parenthetically, it should be noted that the principle that one
is never morally justified in attacking an instance of a basic good
can give rise to wildly improbable conclusions, particularly when
it is applied to actions that we would not already be inclined to
judge as morally problematic on other grounds. For example,
consider the following case: During the Superbowl, the police in
Dallas are told that a bomb has been planted in the stadium, and
it will go off at half-time. Imagine further that the police have
every reason to believe that this is no hoax; there really is a
bomb, a big bomb, and if it goes off there will be a tremendous
loss of life. Can the police stop the game and evacuate the stadium? If we apply the logic of the Grisez/Finnis analysis of
morality, they cannot. The football game in progress is an instantiation of the basic good of a skilled performance, and as such,
it cannot be destroyed or impeded, even to avert a threat to the
basic good of life. I am not saying that Grisez and Finnis would
draw this conclusion, but given their insistence that no instance
of a basic good can be sacrificed, even to preserve another instance
of a basic good, it is difficult to see how they could avoid it.
So far we have examined some difficulties in Grisez's and
Finnis's claim that there are basic, irreducible goods. But perhaps a plausible case can be made for a weaker version of this
claim than the one they offer: Even granting that " knowledge,"
" life," and the like name abstractions of uncertain ontological
status, it might still be said that to describe a course of action in

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JEAN

PORTER

such a way as to show that it would produce or preserve one of
these goods is to indicate why, all other things being equal, any rational agent would have a rationally compelling motive to act in
the way indicated. It might be argued in this way that there is
a limited but definite sense in which the basic goods are always
perceived as being desirable, without implying anything about
just what it is that we desire when we desire one of the basic
goods. But even this weaker claim is not self-evident.
Consider two counter-examples. First, suppose that you are
the last person in a very long line at the check-out counter in the
grocery store. You have plenty of time and nothing to do. Your
eye catches a headline on the cover of the National Enquirer:
"Shocking new evidence indicates that Princess Di is having an
affair with Michael Jackson!,, Assuming that you didn't know
that, wouldn't mind the minuscule expenditure of effort necessary
to pick up the paper and read about it, and (admittedly an unlikely hypothesis) have good reason to trust the reliability of the National Enquirer, does it follow that you have a rationally compelling motive to act in order to obtain this bit of knowledge?
No; you may just not care to learn anything about the personal
life of the Princess of Wales. And assuming that you are not
personally involved with the royal family yourself, there is nothing patently irrational in such an attitude.
Secondly, suppose that you have a terminal disease that will
end in a prolonged (but painless) coma. Your doctor asks
whether you want to be kept alive artificially during this period,
and you say no. Again, there is nothing obviously irrational in
that response. Even assuming that you have no countervailing
reasons to wish to be allowed to die (you
not be experiencing pain or anything else, and supposing further that you have
outlived all your relatives and close friends-there is no one left
who would suffer from your comatose state), the simple fact that
you would be alive in a coma does not give you a rationally compelling reason to ask to be sustained indefinitely in that state.
There is yet another difficulty to be considered. As Ronald
McKinney points out, there seems to be no compelling reason to

BASIC GOODS A:N"D THE HUMAN GOOO

41

hold that the seven basic goods proposed by Grisez and Finnis
comprise the only possible objects for rational action. 16 Indeed,
these goods are described in such vague terms that most of what
we desire can be fitted under the heading of one or another of
them; but at least one obvious candidate for what is per se desirable is left off the list, namely, physical pleasure. Grisez's argument for this exclusion is that pleasure cannot be an intelligible
good, and therefore cannot be an object of practical reason. 17
But he equivocates. If by " intelligible good " he means something
that has a necessary intellectual component, like knowledge, then
neither is human life, taken by itself, an intelligible good; on the
other hand, if he means something that can be the object of
thought and planning, then certainly physical pleasure can be an
intelligible good (just as much as life itself can be). It begins to
seem that underlying Grisez's argument at this point is a hunch
that pleasure is just not worthy to be a basic human good, that
poetry must somehow be better than pushpin if the human race is
to maintain its dignity.
Moreover, it is not at all self-evident that the basic goods are
truly basic in all their instantiations, and never function as instrumental goods. Indeed, it would seem to be just as plausible
to describe life itself as an instrumental good, as opposed to a
basic good. After all, life is no blessing, and can be a burden, as
we say, when an individual is not capable of enjoying those things
which seem to many to be the goods that make life worthwhile.
Admittedly, Grisez has a special argument for the basic status of
the good of human life : If we deny that human life is a basic (as
opposed to an instrumental) good, then we are denying the embodied character of the human person and falling into a false
dualism. 18 But as Rittinger observes, that is a very odd move
indeed for someone who claims that life is a self-evident basic
1 5 Ronald H. McKinney, S. J., " The Quest for an Adequate Proportionalist Theory of Value," The Thomist 53.l: 56-73, at 61-68.
11 Grisez, Way, 119-121.
18 Grisez, Way, 137-138.

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JEAN PORTER

good, that is, that it can be perceived as such without benefit of
any specific philosophical presuppositions. 19
It begins to look very much as if the list of supposed selfevident basic goods proposed by Grisez and Finnis presupposes an
account of the good for the human person, which remains implicit but which serves nevertheless to indicate which seeming
basic goods are in fact such. Furthermore, I suggest that the list
of basic goods that Grisez and Finnis propose has seemed generally plausible because most of their readers will have been
formed in the same tradition of thought as Grisez and Finnis
themselves, a tradition heavily (and somewhat inconsistently) influenced by Aquinas and Kant.zo That is, Grisez and Finnis and
most of their readers will share the same general notion of the
human good, which will give a high priority to the values of life
and sociability (thanks to Aquinas), a sort of rationality that is
opposed to the sensual and emotional (thanks to Kant), and above
all, a pluralism of values and the freedom to fashion one's own
notion of the good life out of those values (again, thanks to
Kant, as read through classical liberalism). Moving within this
intellectual tradition, the list of goods provided by Grisez and
Finnis is indeed plausible (although it is not so clear that the
same could be said about the eight modes of responsibility that
in their assumption that this
they identify). Their mistake
list of goods would be self-evident to any rational agent, and not
only to those who share their implicit notion of the human good.

Goods and the good in proportionalism
It may seem that the preceding arguments provide an implicit
brief for some version of proportionalism. But if these arguments
are correct, what they suggest instead is that the proportionalists
19 Rittinger,

Critique, 44, 63.
I have argued elsewhere that Aquinas's own use of the language of goods
depends on a comprehensive account of the natural, as well as the supernatural
human good, by which particular goods are identified and placed in ordered
relationships to one another, in my The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of
Aquinas for Christian Ethics (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press,
1990)' 82-91.
2Q

BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD

43

have not offered a sufficiently radical challenge to the Grisez/
Finnis theory of morality. To the extent that the proportionalists
have failed to offer an alternative account of the human good in
which to ground their account of goods, their account of morality
is likewise vitiated.
In order to see whether this claim is justified, it will be helpful
to begin by examining certain remarks on proportionalism offered
by Richard McCormick, not only because of the influence of his
work, but above all because he has indicated his agreement with
the account of basic goods developed by Finnis and Grisez. 21 He
parts company with them, however, at the point at which they
turn from their account of the basic goods to explain how the
basic goods serve as the basis for moral obligation. As he observes,
The crucial question one must raise with both Grisez and Finnis is :
What is to count for turning against a basic good, and why? At
this point I find them both unsatisfactory. Finnis argues that whenever one positively suppresses a possible good, he directly chooses
against it. And since one may never do this, he argues, there are
certain actions that are immoral regardless of the foreseeable consequences. This is a sophisticated form of an older structuralism. A
careful study of Christian moral tradition will suggest that an action
must be regarded as " turning directly against a basic good " only
after the relation of the choice to all values has been weighed carefully.22

In a later work, McCormick proposes what amounts to an alternative first principle of morality (FPM), which, like the
Grisez/Finnis version, is proposed as self-evidently true: "Now
in situations of this kind [conflict situations], the rule of Christian reason, if we are governed by the ordo bonorum, is to choose
21. Richard A. McCormick, " Notes on Moral Theology: April-September
1972,'' reprinted in Notes on Moral Theology: 1965-1980 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1981), 423-472, at 451-454; also see Richard A.
McCormick, S.J., " Proxy Consent in the Experimentation Situation," in
James Johnson and David Smith, eds., Love and Society: Essays in the
Ethics of Paul Ramsey (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1974), 209-228,
at 217-218.
22 McCormick, Notes, 453.

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JEAN PORTER

the lesser evil. This general statement is, it would seem, beyond
debate; for the only alternative is that in conflict situations we
should choose the greater evil, which is patently absurd. This
means that all concrete rules and distinctions are subsidiary to
this and hence valid to the extent that they actually convey to us
what is factually the lesser evil." 23 We might reformulate this
version of the FPM to read: "Always act in such a way as to
bring about the greatest possible balance of premoral goods over
premoral evils, given that you can do so without directly bringing about moral evil." I believe it is safe to say that nearly every
other proportionalist would accept this first principle of morality
as well.24 The negative corollary of this principle may be stated
as, " Never act in such a way as to bring about a premoral evil,
unless your action will also bring about (or preserve) proportionately greater premoral goods."
As the preceding section indicates, I agree that McCormick is
quite right in his observation that Grisez and Finnis do not give
a satisfactory account of what it is to act in such a way as to attack or impede an instance of a basic good. But it is not clear
that the alternative analysis developed by him and other proportionalist moral theologians is more successful. How do we determine, in any given situation, what counts as the greater good
or the lesser evil? Clearly, the cogency of proportionalism as a
23 Richard A. McCormick, S.J., "Ambiguity in Moral Choice," in Richard
A. McCormick and Paul Ramsey, eds., Doing Evil to Achieve Good: Moral
Choices in Conflict Situations (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1978), 753, at 38.
2 4 See, for example, the characterization
of proportionalism offered by
Edward V. Vacek, S.J., "Proportionalism: One View of the Debate," Theological Studies 46 (1985), 287-314, at 289 and Bernard Hoose, Proportionalism:
The American Debate and Its European Roots (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1987), 77-91. The qualification is necessary because the
revisionists generally insist that we are never justified in directly bringing
about a moral evil, even to avert a seemingly greater premoral evil. But this
is a narrow, although not unimportant qualification, since " moral evil " is understood to consist in a bad will, and nothing else; practically, this qualification amounts to a prohibition against direct scandal and formal cooperation in
evil.

BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD

45

moral theory depends on the adequacy of the answer that is given
to this question.
In many cases, it is relatively easy to give a plausible answer :
it is better to save one life than to lose two lives, it is better to
feed a hundred children than sixty, to support both one's parents
as opposed to allowing one's father to starve while maintaining
mama in luxury. What characterizes cases like these is that they
present us with alternatives in which we must choose between
greater and lesser instantiations of what appear to be essentially
the same goods; indeed, these sorts of cases leave us wondering
if anything is left for moral reflection to do.25 But most of the
situations that we face are not like this. Rather, they demand
that we adjudicate among widely different kinds of goods, which
cannot readily be compared in the way that a proportionalist analysis demands. Is it better to destroy the life of a child conceived
through rape, or to force the
to endure the mental suffering and social shame of bearing the child of a rapist? If we
must cut the federal budget, which should we sacrifice first-support for the fine arts, or support for prenatal care programs? In
cases of this sort, it is difficult to see what it might mean to
choose the greater good-so difficult that we begin to wonder
whether we can give any sense to " greater " and " lesser " in
this context at all.
This objection to proportionalism is very familiar, and proportionalists themselves generally admit that no one has yet provided a fully satisfactory answer to it; although a number of suggestions for a rule or rules of commensuration of goods have
been offered, none has obtained general acceptance by proportionalists themselves, and all would seem to be open to serious criticism.211 Until an adequate set of standards for commensuration
can be provided, proportionalism must be considered as a pro25 Grisez develops this objection against proportionalism at greater length;
see Grisez, Way, 152.
2s A number of different meanings given to " proportionate reason " have
been summarized and critiqued by Brian V. Johnstone, C.S.S.R., in "The
Meaning of Proportionate Reason in Contemporary Moral Theology," The
Thomist 49.2.

46

JEAN PORTER

gram for developing a theory of morality, rather than as a theory
of morality. What are the prospects for developing such a set of
standards?
It would seem that if the proportionalists are to develop a
persuasive account of a rule or rules by which goods may be commensurated, then they must take one of two routes. 27 Either
they must show that the seemingly diverse human goods are all
really derived in some way from one fundamental human good,
which provides a standard for commensuration; or they must
argue that human goods stand in some intrinsic ordering among
themselves, in such a way that, faced with a choice between disparate kinds of goods, we can discern which is intrinsically more
desirable. The former line of approach leads straight to utilitarianism, with. all its well-rehearsed difficulties, and the proportionalists have wisely avoided it. 28 But on the other hand it is
difficult to see how we might argue that discrete goods are
ordered, without some account of the human good simpliciter,
which would provide some criteria by which to identify particular
basic goods and to place them in some order to one another. But
the proportionalists generally have been no more willing to provide such an account than have Grisez and Finnis and their collaborators.
Furthermore, to the extent that the proportionalists share with
Grisez and Finnis the assumption that there are self-evident basic
goods, which serve as the starting-point for moral discernment,
their work suffers from a still more serious difficulty. We have
already seen that proportionalists have not yet been able to offer
a satisfactory account of the way in which we are to assess the
relative balance of goods and evils that would be produced by the
2 7 McKinney takes a third approach, advocating a balancing of values, so
that values that have been neglected thus far are brought forward ("Quest,"
68-73). But his version of proportionalism is vulnerable to the criticism, detailed below, that it calls for an impossible adjudication among an indefinitely
large number of values (see especially 69-71).
28 On the differences between proportionalism and utilitarianism, see Lisa
Sowle Cahill, " Teleology, Utilitarianism, and Christian Ethics," Theological
Studies 42 (1981), 601-629.

BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD

47

different courses of action open to us. But no matter how we
understand that process, it is clear that no such assessment would
be possible in a given situation, unless that situation presents us
with a finite set of goods to be assessed. Of course, the proportionalists recognize that many of the situations that we face are so
complex that no one could offer anything more than an approximate assessment of the different goods and evils that different
courses of action would produce. But in order for even an approximate assessment to be possible, there must be some one,
definite set of projected goods and evils to be assessed. If it would
be impossible in principle for a perfect assessor perfectly to weigh
the goods and evils involved in different courses of action, then
it is not possible for us imperfect assessors to come up with even
an imperfect assessment.
And that is indeed the case, so long as we cannot appeal to any
normative standpoint by which to determine which, out of all the
logically possible candidates, are the true goods (and evils) in
a given set of projected courses of action. Without some such
normative standpoint, there are indefinitely many possible accounts of what the goods are in any state of affairs, as many as
there are possible evaluators of that state of affairs. Moreover,
these accounts are not only indefinitely varied, they may well also
be at odds. For example, consider a debate between an ordinary
Sierra Club type conservationist and an exponent of a radical
ecological mysticism over the pi;oposed uses of a tract of forest
land in Yellowstone Park. The ecological mystic believes that the
earth itself is a living creature, whose interests must be considered, whereas the conservationist only considers human interests.
An argument between these two is not likely to get very far ; not
only are they going to assess the relative goods and evils in the
proposed actions differently, they are going to see different goods
and evils. For example, the ecological mystic may see a change in
the ecosystem of this tract of land as being an inherent evil, regardless of its impact on human persons, whereas the conservationist would not. Conversely, the conservationist might consider
the economic benefits to farmers who might work the land as being inherently good, whereas the ecological mystic would not.

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JEAN PORTER

It is more difficult to identify the presuppositions of propor"tionalism than it is to identify the presuppositions underlying the
work of Grisez and Finnis and their followers, because the former,
unlike the latter, represents the work of scores of scholars who
have not collaborated closely and who disagree with one another
on many points. Nonetheless, I believe that a careful examination
of their writings would reveal that most of the proportionalists,
like Grisez and Finnis, presuppose an account of the human good
which determines their accounts of the discrete goods. Indeed, although I cannot defend this judgment here, I suspect that the notion of the human good presupposed by most proportionalists
would be very similar to that presupposed by Grisez and Finnis,
although it would probably reflect the influence of Kant a little
less, and the influence of American pragmatism a little more,
than would the latter account. 29
H the line of analysis developed in this article i.s correct, then
it suggests an explanation for the interminableness of the debate
between Grisez and Finnis and their supporters on the one hand,
and the proportionalists on the other: At the present time, the
terms of this debate do not allow for its resolution. 30 That is, the
notion of basic human goods shared by both sides in this debate
does not have sufficient content, taken by itself, to allow for a rational resolution of the central question in this debate, namely,
" How are we to move from an account of the basic goods, to an
account of moral obligations based on those goods? " To put the
matter more sharply, there are no such things as self-evident basic
goods, and therefore, attempts to decide what it means to act
against them, to determine whether they are incommensurable,
and so forth, are not going to be very successful. However, if
this debate were approached explicitly as a debate over rival (yet
similar) accounts of the human good, it would be possible to
move it to its proper arena, that is, philosophical and theological
anthropology, rather than leaving it on the necessarily murky bat2 9 Compare

Vacek, "Proportionalism," 306-309.

so I argue for this claim in more detail in my book, The Recovery

16-21.

of Virtue,

BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD

49

tlefield of competing " self-evident " truths, detached from rival
strands of a shared philosophical/theological tradition. Of course,
there would be formidable theoretical difficulties involved in any
effort to defend a conception of an integral good that cannot be
reduced to discrete goods. But, as I have argued elsewhere,
Aquinas provides us with at least one example of a successful account of the integral human good, and if his theory has been
rendered untenable by subsequent philosophical and theological
developments, it at least provides us with a model for developing a more adequate account, given our own intellectual context. 31
At any rate, an effort to reformulate debates within Catholic
moral theology as debates over the nature of the human good
would at least clarify these debates and the resultant conversation
might even lead to a more convincing theory of the human good
than either side has yet offered. 32

3 1 This is the overall argument of The Recovery of Virtue.
32 I am indebted to Patrick Henry, Justus George Lawler, and Raymond
Pedrizetti for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. In addition, I
delivered a version of this essay as a lecture at the Institute for Ecumenical
and Cultural Research at Collegeville, Minnesota, in the fall of 1988, and
many helpful comments and suggestions were offered by those present.

A CONTRADICTION IN SAINT THOMAS'S
TEACHING ON CREATION
THEODORE

J. KONDO LEON

Villanova University
Villanova, Pennsylvania

0 THOSE FAMILIAR with Saint Thomas's writings
is generally known that the Angelic Doctor changed his
position on a number of philosophical issues during the
course of his relatively short professional career. For instance,
there is his opinion concerning the instrumental role of higher
creatures in the creation of the universe-something he allowed
as possible in his Commentary on the Sentences but later rejected in his Disputed Question On the Power of God and in the
Summa Theologiae. Another example is Thomas's view on the
possibility of an actual infinite multitude, an opinion he accepted
in the early Disputed Question On Truth but argued against in
the Summa Theologiae.1
However, to change one's mind on a particular issue is not to
contradict oneself, since to do that is to say or hold, in the same
time frame, p while also saying or holding not p. However, in his
Treatise on Creation in the Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas
does, at least once, contradict himself in what he has to say on
the question of the demonstrability of the world's temporal beginning, a contradiction which, to my knowledge, has never previous1 On the question whether higher creatures can be instrumental causes in
the creation of lower creatures see In Sent. IV, d. 5, q. 5, a. 3; De potentia
Dei, q. 3, a. le and Summa Theologiae, I, q, 45, a. Sc. On the issue of an
actual infinite multitude see D. Q. De veritate, q. 2, a. 9 and Summa Theologiae, 1, q. 7, a. 5. However, in the De aeternitate mundi-a work possibly
written after Saint Thomas completed the first part of his Summa-Aquinas
asserts, towards the end of this work, that no demonstration has as yet been
forthcoming that God cannot produce a multitude that is actually infinite.

51

52

THEODORE

J.

KONDOLEON

ly been noted. In what follows I intend to expose this contradiction and to see whether there is any possible way for him to
escape it.

I
In article 1 of Question 46 of the Prima pars, Aquinas argues
that it cannot be demonstrated that the world of creatures always
existed, given that the actual existence of creatures depends upon
the causal will of God and the only thing which God wills necessarily is Himself. 2 Consequently, whether or not the world
exists, or is created eternally or with a temporal beginning, are
matters entirely up to God's free will.3 In the following article he
argues that neither can the world's temporal beginning be demonstrated but that this is something known only by faith. 4 It cannot be demonstrated from the world itself since demonstration
proceeds by way of knowledge of the universal essences of things
and universals abstract from the hie et nunc, or from the question of temporal origin. 5 Nor can it be proved from the world's
efficient cause-the divine will-seeing that God's will cannot be
investigated by reason except as regards those things which God
wills necessarily (and what He wills about creatures is not among
2 " Dicendum nihil praeter Deum ab aeterno fuisse. Et hoc ponere non est
impossibile. Ostensum est enim supra quad voluntas Dei est causa rerum. Sic
ergo necesse est esse sicut necesse est Deum velle ilia, cum necessitatis effectus
ex necessitate causae dependeat, ut dicitur in Meta. Ostensum est autem supra
quod, absolute loquendo, non est necesse Deum velle aliquid nisi seipsum." ST
I, q. 46, a. le. Latin quotations from Saint Thomas appearing in the footnotes
are from the Leonine edition.
3 " Non est ergo necessarium Deum velle quod mundus fuerit semper. Sed
eatenus mundus est quatenus Deus vult illum esse, cum esse mundi ex voluntate
dependeat, sicut ex sua causa. Non est igitur necessarium mundum semper
esse: Unde nee demonstrative probari potest." Ibid.
4 " Dicendum quod mundum non semper fuisse sola fidei tenetur, et demonsrtative probari non potest; sicut et supra de mysterio Trinitatis dictum est."
Ibid., a. 2c.
5 "Et hujus ratio est, quia novitas mundi non potest demonstrationem recipere
ex parte ipsius mundi. Demonstrationis enim principium est quad quid est.
Unumquodque autern secundum rationem suae speciei abstrahit ab hie et nunc;
propter quod dicitur quod universalia sunt ubique et semper. Unde demonstrari non potest quod homo, aut caelum, aut lapis non semper fuit.'' Ibid.

CONTRADICTION

IN TEACHING

ON CREATION

53

these). 8 Saint Thomas' s teaching here appears to be relatively
clear and uncomplicated : one cannot demonstrate either the
world's eternity or its temporal beginning.
Moreover, Aquinas also thought this teaching necessary in the
interest of the faith. Evidently, to maintain that the world's
eternity can be demonstrated (as certain philosophers had) is to
contradict Sacred Scripture, while to argue (as any number of
Christian and Arabic philosophers have) that reason can prove
the world's temporal beginning is misguided-because mistakenand therefore a possible source of derision to the faith. 7 The
latter position is mistaken because it is quite conceivable, prescinding from what we know from Revelation, that the world
and motion are eternal. 8 Furthermore, the usual arguments
brought forth to prove the world's beginning, perhaps with one
exception, easily admit of refutation. 9 Consequently, if one were,
6 " Similiter etiam neque ex parte causae agentis, quae agit per voluntatem.
Voluntas enim Dei investigari non potest, nisi circa ea quae absolute necesse
est Deum velle ; talia autem non sunt quae circa creaturas vult, ut dicitur est.''
Ibid.
7 " Potest autem voluntas divina homini manifestari per revelationem, cui
fides innititur. Unde mundum incoepisse est credibile, non autem demonstrabile
vel scibile. Et hoc utile est ut consideretur, ne forte aliquis quod fidei est
demonstrare praesumens rationes non necessarias inducat, quae praebeant materiam irridendi infidelibus, estimantibus nos propter hujusmodi rationes credere
quae fidei sunt.'' Ibid.
8 Aquinas's replies to the objections of this article proceed on the assumption that there is nothing inconceivable about an eternal world. However, as he
says in his reply to the fifth objection, "etsi mundus semper fuisset, non tamen
parificaretur Deo in aeternitate, ut dicit Boetius, in fine de Consol., quia esse
divinum est esse totum simul absque successione ; non autem sic est de mundo."
Ibid., ad 5.
9 This position, viz., that the world is possibly eternal, is argued strenuously
in his De aeternitate mundi. If we may quote here from this text: " The same
situation emerges if we carefully consider the position of those who held that
the world had always existed; for in spite of this they teach that it was made
by God, and perceived no logical contradiction in this doctrine. Therefore,
they who descry such inconsistency with their hawk-like vision are the only
rational beings, and wisdom was born with them.'' (In this last sentence we
notice a sarcasm somewhat rare for Aquinas, indicating, perhaps, the degree
of temper this issue provoked.) The English translation is that of Cyril Vollert, S.J., and is found in St. Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant, St. Bonaventure: On the Eternity of the World (Milwaukee: Marquette University
Press, 1964), p. 24.

54

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J. KONDOLEON

with such arguments, to support this religious belief it would
leave it open to ridicule. Clearly, then, for Saint Thomas (or so
it would seem) the world's beginning is wholly a matter of faith
and cannot be demonstrated by reason.
However, concerning this last point, there is textual evidence
to suggest (indeed even more than suggest) that Saint Thomas
was not as dead set against the position that the world's (and
with it time's) beginning cannot be known by reason as his general argument in article 2 of this question would have us believe.
(We are here touching upon what I discern to be a genuine contradiction in his thought.) Indeed, as we shall very soon see,
what he has to say in two replies of article 1 would seem to indicate that he did, at least implicitly, maintain this view, even
though he would also want to hold irrevocably to the position that
an eternal world, or, more precisely, an eternal spiritual world,
is not an impossibility. Moreover, given the benefit of today's
science, he would, I think, be willing to concede that unaided reason can know that this universe of ours did have a temporal origin
-whether by creation or not is another matter-and that it is
therefore not eternal and so must have a cause.10 Again, his view
that demonstration proceeds by way of a knowledge of the universal essences of things (be they physical, mathematical or metaphysical in nature) would strike us today as decidedly too narrow. (Indeed Aquinas himself may have rejected this view in the
case of a demonstration quia, e.g., a lunar eclipse will occur, even
though he might reply that this type of demonstration does not
establish that lunar eclipses had a beginning and that there can
be no such demonstration.) As is well-known, it can be demonstrated-and with a reasonable degree of accuracy-by archaeological finds and by carbon dating how long particular material
substances or their types have been in existence in our universe.
Finally, in one of his replies in article 2 of this question Aquinas
seems willing to allow, given his position in this work that an
actual infinite multitude is impossible, that man, if not the world,
1 °For a good discussion of this point see ibid., the translator's Introduction,
particularly pages 2 and 3.

CONTRADICTION

IN TEACHING

ON CREATION

55

can be demonstrated to have had a temporal beginning-a demonstration he had seemingly ruled out in the body of this article
where he restricts demonstration to universals and says it does
not settle questions of temporal origin. 11
II
But to come to the contradictions (I indicated possibly more
than one) to which I alluded at the outset of my discussion:
they occur between things he says in articles 1 and 2 of Question
46. In the body of article 1, which I have in part already summarized, he maintains that only God can be eternal (actually what
he intends to say here is that only God is necessarily eternal) seeing that the only thing which God wills necessarily is Himself. 12
this truth about the divine will he can then go on to argue
that whether creatures exist at all or exist eternally or with a
temporal beginning depends upon a free decision on God's part.
Although he does not consider, in the body of the article, the
question of why God decides to create the world (along with
time) with a beginning (rather than willing that it be without a
beginning), he does put forth a reason for this divine decision in
his replies to objections 6 and 9. In both replies he points out that
God must be considered as giving time to His effect (the universe) as much as and when He willed and according to what
was fitting to manifest His power; for (as he maintains in both
these texts) "the world leads more evidently to a knowledge of
the divine creating power if it was not always than if it always
was (for everything which was not always manifestly has a
cause, whereas this is not so manifest of what always was.)" 13
See ST I, q. 46, a. 2c. also see ibid., ad 8.
Leonine reading is "nihil praeter eum ab aeterno fuisse ". The Piana
edition has a variant reading where the word "potest " is inserted for the perfect infinite "fuisse ". Aquinas could have meant by the word "eternal" here
the Boethian sense of eternal. Otherwise understood the statement must be
interpreted to read in part, " can be necessarily eternally ".
13 " Sed in agente universa!i, quod producit rem et tempus, non est considerare quod agat nunc et non prius secundum imaginationem temporis post
tempus, quasi tempus praesupponatur ejus actione; sed considerandum est, quod
11

12 The

56

THEODORE

J. KONDOLEON

But if Aquinas thought this to be so, viz., that the reason why
God created the world with a temporal beginning was in order
that its author's existence be more manifest to us, then is it not
logical to assume that he must have also thought it to be true that
the world's beginning is something that God intends us to know
by reason? Yet, as we know, in the very next article he argues
that the world's beginning is entirely a matter of faith l Furthermore, he also asserts in this article that the wiU of God cannot
be investigated by human reason except in regard to things that
God wills necessarily, and what He wills about creatures is not
one of them, apparently not even why He created the world with
a temporal beginning (viz., "ut manifestius declaret suum
auctorem ") l
In his discussion in these articles, then, we apparently find two
contradictions in Saint Thomas's expressed thought. One-perhaps less significant so far as his general philosophical position
here is concerned-occurs when (in the replies I have noted) he
provides us with a reason why God created the world with a beginning, but then, in the body of the very next article, goes on to
inform us that-concerning things which God does not will necessarily (e.g., the world, be it with or without a temporal beginning )-the divine will cannot be investigated by reason. (However, as I will argue momentarily, there is no real contradiction
here.) The other contradiction, which would seem to be the
more serious one, consists in his holding in article 1 (in his replies to objections 6 and 9) that the temporal origin of the world
leads more evidently to the divine creating power (and thus,
presumably, is something that can be known to us from reason)
dedit effectui suo tempus quantum voluit, et secundum quad conveniens fuit
ad suam patentiam demonstrandum. Manifestius enim mundus ducit in cognitionem divinae potentiae creantis si rnundus non semper fuit quam si semper
fuisset ; omne enim quod non semper fuit manifestum est habere causam, sed
non ita manifestum est de eo quod semper fuit." Ibid., a. 1, ad 6. And in reply
to objection 9 we read: "Licet igitur Deum ab aeterno fuerit sufficiens causa
mundi, non tamen oportet quod ponatur mundum ab eo productus nisi secundum
quad est in praedefinitiane suae voluntatis, ut scilicet habeat esse post non esse
ut manifestius declaret suum Auctorem." Ibid., ad 9.

CONTRADICTION

IN TEACHING

ON CREATION

57

than if the world had always existed, and then arguing in the next
article that the world's beginning is wholly a matter of faith.
Concerning the first argued contradiction, I think it can be
shown to be only an apparent one, based upon a misunderstanding
of Aquinas's position about what we can know concerning the
divine will as it relates to creatures. 14 Certainly he would insist
that we can know why God creates (viz., to communicate a share
in His goodness to creatures so that they can thereby render Him
glory) and why He creates a multitude of creatures including
both spiritual and material ones (viz., so that the universe be
complete and not wanting in any possible grade of creature, in
order thereby to reflect more perfectly the wisdom and goodness
of its creator) .15 However, what he argues in the body of article
2 is that one cannot demonstrate, from any investigation of the
divine will, the world's (and time's) beginning since that depends
on the simple will of God, which need not have willed the world's
existence or willed it to have a temporal beginning. Yet given that
the world did have a beginning (and this, supposedly, we are to
accept on faith), one can then argue for the fittingness of God's
creating it so. (This point will become clearer from a passage we
will very soon quote from the Summa Contra Gentiles.)
But when it comes to the second contradiction I have imputed
to Saint Thomas's teaching in Question 46, it seems to be quite
incorrigible. It should be noted that Aquinas, not only in the
Summa Theologiae but elsewhere in his writings, argues the fittingness of God's creating the world (and time) with a beginning in such a way as to imply that it is something which can be
known to reason apart from faith. Thus, in the Summa Contra
Gentiles, we find this passage (very revealing from the standpoint of our argument) :
14 This apparent contradiction stems from taking in an unqualified or absolute
sense what Aquinas says here about human reason investigating the divine will
as that will relates to creatures.
15 See ST I, q. 19, a. 5, ad 3; ibid., q. 47, a le. Also see Smnma Contra
Gentiles, III-I, ch. 72 (3) and ibid., III-II, ch. 97 (13).

58

THEODORE

J. KONDOLEON

A more effective procedure can be adopted in this matter if we start
with the purpose of the divine will, as was suggested above. The
end of the divine will in the production of things is the goodness of
God as manifested in His effects. But the divine power and goodness are best made known by the fact that things other than God
have not existed forever. The very fact that such things have not
always existed shows clearly that they have their existence from
Him. It also shows that God does not act by necessity of His nature
and that His power of acting is infinite. To manifest the divine goodness, therefore, it was supremely fitting that God should assign to
created things a beginning of their duration.16
Now, as we have seen, in Question 46 in the body of article 2
he argues that the temporal beginning of the world is strictly a
matter of faith. But, then, how else-except presumably by faith
-can we know that the world had a beginning so that we can
be led thereby to know clearly that things " have their existence
from Him " (and that He does not act by necessity of nature and
that His power of acting is infinite) ? Yet for us to come to a
knowledge that God is the world's author from Revelatiow, from
the fact of its being revealed that the world had a beginning, is
clearly a circular procedure and/or, at the very least, a redundant
one (indeed we can already accept from Revelation that God
exists, that he is the author of all, that His power is infinite, etc.).
No, it would seem that what Saint Thomas actually wants us to
accept in these various passages we have cited is the view that we
can more easily or readily come to a knowledge of the world's
author if the world has not always existed than if it always had
("since everything which was not always manifestly has a cause,
whereas this is not so manifest of what always was "), and thus
1 s " Potest autem efficacius procede ad hoc ostendum ex fine divinae voluntatis, ut supra tactum est. Finis enim divinae voluntatis in rerum productione
est eius bonitas inquantum per causata manifestatatur. Potissime autem
manifestatur divina virtus et bonitas per hoc quod res aliae praeter ipsum non
semper fuerunt. Ex hoc enim ostenditur manifeste quod res aliae praeter
ipsum ab ipso esse habent, quia non semper fuerunt. Ostendit etiam quod
non agit per necessitatem naturae ; et quod virtus sua est infinita in agendo.
Hoc igitur convenientissimum fuit divinae bonitati, ut rebus creatis principium
durationis daret." Ibid., II, ch. 38. See also ibid., Ch. 35 (8). For a similar
statement see De potentia Dei, q. 3, a. 17, ad 8.

CONTRADICTION

IN TEACHING

ON CREATION

59

the fittingness of its temporal origin. But this implies (does it
not?)-unless we wish to attribute a circularity to Aquinas's
thought so obvious as to be implausible-that the fact of the
world's beginning (or " newness ") is something that can be
known by reason from the world itself.

III
In one of the replies in this article (article 2), Saint Thomas
seems to suggest that the world's beginning may not be entirely
a matter of faith and that there may be some plausible reasons
that establish it. 11 In his reply to objection 8 he gives some consideration to what he believed, erroneously, to be al-Ghazali's
position on the eternity of the world and on the possibility of an
accidental actual infinite multitude. 18 He seems willing to concede here, given his earlier rejection in this work that an actual
infinite multitude is possible or intelligible, that, if not the world,
then man at least may have had a temporal origin (otherwise, on
the dual assumption of the world's eternity and man's existence
being necessary to complete the world, there would be an actual
infinite multitude of human souls.) 19 However, in other works he
17 In the Summa Contra Gentiles, in Book II, chapter 38 (a chapter from
which we have just quoted in the preceding footnote), in discussing certain
arguments by which some endeavor to prove that the world is not eternal,
Saint Thomas has the following observation : " Since these arguments do not
conclude with strict necessity, although they are not entirely devoid of probability, it is enough to touch on them briefly, so that the Catholic faith may not
seem to rest on inept reasonings rather than on the unshakable basis of God's
teaching." Vollert translation. See Cyril Vollert, S.J., Eternity, p. 43.
18 Actually al-Ghazali rejected both. For this misunderstanding on Saint
Thomas's part concerning al-Ghazali's teaching see Majid Fakhry, A History
of Islamic Philosophy (New York and London: Columbia University Press,
1970), pp. 248-249.
19 The objection here rests on the argument that if the world is eternal
there would now be an infinite number of human souls. In his reply, Aquinas
points out that some do not consider this to be an impossibility (" quidam enim
non reputant impossibile esse infinitas animas actu, ut patet in Meta. Algazelis, dicentis hoc esse infinitum per accidens ") . But he goes on to add that
the world could be eternal, or at least some creature, e.g. an angel, if not
man (" Unde posset dicere aliquius quod mundus fuit aeternus, vel saltem
aliqua ut angelus, non autem homo ") .

THEODORE

J.

KONDOLEON

allows that this is a difficult question and thinks that it is one
that has still not been definitely resolved. 2° Furthermore, the inference that man has a temporal origin would not lead us necessarily to the world's temporal beginning. Even so, despite the fact
that in his other replies to the objections of this article he has
dismissed, as non-probative, arguments purporting to show that
the world cannot be eternal, Aquinas does seem willing to
acknowledge here that what is basically at issue is not (putting
aside what we know from Revelation) whether the material world
is possibly eternal but the more general question whether creatures
(for example, angels) can be created so. 21 And if this is true, then
it cannot be demonstrated that something created cannot be
eternal but that it must have a beginning of its duration (something we do know from Genesis). Now this position is not in
zo In De aeternitate mundi he observes, "They also bring in arguments
which philosophers have touched upon and then undertake to solve them. One
among them is fairly difficult; it concerns the infinite number of souls; if
the world has existed forever, the number of souls must now be infinite." Yet
he goes on to say: " But this argument is not to the purpose, because God
could have made the world without men and souls; or He could have made
men at the time He did make them, even though He made all the rest of the
world from eternity. Thus the souls surviving their bodies would not be infinite. Besides no demonstration has yet been forthcoming that God cannot
produce a multitude that is infinite." As quoted in Cyril Vollert, S.J., Eternity,
p. 25. If I may briefly comment on this text, Saint Thomas's argument here is
quite disappointing in two notable respects. For one, there doesn't seem to be
much sense in arguing, against the view that if there is an eternal world
there is an actual infinite number of human souls, that God could have created
man at some time in the past (say, when He did create him) and not eternally. For then, on the assumption of the world's eternity, there would be an
infinite past time preceding the time that man was created and this would
seem to render unintelligible why God created man at this particular time-the time He presumably did create man-rather than at some prior time
(and so on ad infinitum). Secondly, to say that it has not been demonstrated
as yet that an actual infinite multitude is impossible (or cannot be made by
God) in order to refute the view of those who hold that it can be demonstrated that the world is not eternal, is seemingly to employ an argumentum
ad ignorantiam and really does little to help Saint Thomas, philosophically, in
this argument.
21" Nos autem intendimus universailter in a!iqua creatura fuerit ab aeterno."
ST, I, q. 4-0, a. 2, ad 8.

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ON CREATION

61

itself incompatible with what he has asserted in the preceding
article about the world's leading more manifestly to God's existence if it has not always existed than if it were created eternally.
Perhaps, then, in the final analysis all that Aquinas wishes to
show in this article inquiring whether the world's beginning is
an article of faith, is that it cannot be demonstrated that God's
creation cannot be eternal and that, therefore, the beginning of
creatures generally is an article of faith.
Still it must be conceded that nowhere does he himself argue
the position that from the world itself we can know, or infer, its
temporal origin. Indeed, his usual teaching is just the opposite.22
Nevertheless, as I believe I have conclusively shown, he implicitly
affirms as much in certain texts which I have cited. It would
seem, then, that we have here a genuine contradiction in Saint
Thomas's expressed thought, one that is readily seen without
any need for taking sides philosophically. I personally know of
no way, philosophically or hermeneutically, to escape this conclusion but perhaps some reader, more knowledgeable than I, may.

22 In this connection it may be noted that all the formal arguments for God's
existence found in Aquinas's writings proceed on the implicit premise that an
eternal world is possible.

TRANSCENDENT

MAN IN THE LIMITED CITY:

THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
CHARLES N. R. McCOY
]AMES

OF

v. SCHALL, S.J.

Georgetown University
Washington, D. C.

The history of political philosophy since the time of St. Thomas has
been a history of successive failures to relate ethics to politics and
of successive attempts to find a substitute for theology, either in
politics itself . . . or in economics. . . . Men are today oppressed by
false theologies erected into political systems, and those who are not
so oppressed are in risk of becoming so oppressed by an intellectual
and moral inability to defend themselves. St. Thomas's political science will not give us the answers to problems of hydro-electric development or technological unemployment ; but it will give us the
answer to the most vital of contemporary problems: how to secure
the rational foundations of humane living.
-Charles N. R. McCoy," St. Thomas and Political Science." 1

I

I

N WRITING ABOUT the small but rich corpus in political
philosophy by Charles N. R. McCoy, the temptation is almost
irresistible to call it, wittily, " The Real McCoy," or, more
academically, a theoretic essay on the reasons for our " intellectual
and moral inability to defend ourselves." The kind of being we
are, no doubt, needs defense, needs an explication that justifies
its unique givenness. Charles N. R. McCoy is not generally wellknown, though he has a small and (one hopes) growing number
of admirers. The very cultural unlikelihood of his central theme,
1 On the Intelligibility of Political Philosophy: Essays of Charles N. R.
McCoy, edited by James V. Schall, S.J. and John J. Schrems (Washington:
Catholic University of America Press, 1989), p. 38.

63

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JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J.

which 1s m no sense Hegelian, that there is indeed a coherent
philosophical intelligibility-a "structure "-to political philosophy, makes his work both unique, profoundly appealing, and perhaps even prophetic. McCoy was concerned to explain the transcendence of each person, each citizen, beyond the city, indeed beyond this world, without denying his exact political nature and
the reasons for its limits. Man was both a political and a philosophical animal to whom more than either politics or philosophy
was given. The dignity of the city was essentially revealed in its
limits, in what good it could do with its own means while leaving other admitted goods untouched, in what questions it could
legitimately bring up because of its experienced life, but still
could not answer by itself.
On reading him carefully in one's own pursuit of philosophic
wisdom in an age replete with sundry mental and moral confusions, it is tempting to affirm that, at last, in political philosophy
here is found a body of reflection which is indeed " the real
McCoy." Here is a consistent examination of philosophic principle that accounts for the contours of the whole of the discipline
in its most radical origins and clearest limits. McCoy's "reality"
does not, to be sure, exist for most of the political science profession itself nor for Christian thinkers in the field of political
thought. This situation is unfortunate on both counts.
Political philosophy, for its part, has pursued in modern times
the line of its own autonomy in rejecting the great tradition which
affirmed the limited place of politics in the order of being, its position as a practical, not speculative science. Theology-itself seeking relevance in lieu of transcendence-has largely imitated this
modern turn in political thought. The crisis in theology is, more
than anything else, the result of a crisis in political philosophy, its
evolution in modernity. Thus in a discipline in which so many
of the ultimate human issues are either not confronted at all or
are at best confused, in a theological environment which is itself
largely infected with the theoretical deviations McCoy chronicled,
this benign neglect of his work may turn out to be an advantage.
McCoy's independence of these ideological movements, grounded

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as it is in the philosophical tradition from which these movements
systematically deviated, provides a new and fresh way of coming
to terms with the meaning of political philosophy itself.
In a spirit of calmness and quietness indicative of the sort of
man he was, it will be the burden of this analysis to suggest that
in the work of Charles N. R. McCoy there exists a preparation
for and an analysis of the true understanding of the whole of
political philosophy, itself an introduction to and intellectual protection for philosophy and ultimately revelation. It is on this intellectual front, moreover, by the very nature of "modernity"
itself, that theology in the classic sense of revelation can be defended, indeed positively shown to respond to questions that authentically arise in the experience of political living. 2 Even
though politics is the organized " living " and " living well " that
Aristotle said it was, we should still make every effort, as Aristotle also emphasized ( 1177b26-78al), to pursue in particular
those higher things, the things existing " for their own sakes," if
we would live completely well. To know the truth is the highest
act of living well and also, paradoxically, the presupposition for
the continued health of any city. Metaphysics and its history, in
other words, must not be unknown quantities to the political
philosopher.
McCoy understood that the deepest aberrations of the civil
polity arose not from the vices of the ordinary citizens, which
were apt to be real enough, but from the ideas of the philosophers.
He sensed that " the rational foundation of humane living " included first of all a proper understanding of that in which this
human living consisted. McCoy was ever a follower of Aristotle
in this regard, of course (1267a3-17). He knew that knowing the
definition of the truth did not necessarily mean that it would be
2 See James V. Schall, Reason, Revelation and the Foundations of Political
Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). See also
E. B. F. Midgley, The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International
Relations (London: Elek, 1975) ; "Concerning the Modernist Subversions of
Political Philosophy," The New Scholasticism LIII (Spring, 1979), 168-90;
" On the ' Substitute Intelligences ' in the Formation of Atheistic Ideology,"
Laval theologique et philosophique 34 (October, 1980), 239-53.

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followed. Again and again he insisted on the fact that there was
no absolute commensurability of ethics and politics with metaphysics. 3 Good men could be bad thinkers. The most profound
of philosophers could be corrupt men. On the other hand, ethics,
politics, and metaphysics at the level of being were commensurable with each other and ultimately with revelation. We do not,
except accidentally, think incorrectly with impunity.
II
The outlines of McCoy's life are brief. He was a Roman
Catholic priest, of the diocese of St. Paul. Academically, he did
his undergraduate work at Dartmouth College and, before the
priesthood, a doctorate in political science on constitutional law at
the University of Chicago. McCoy evidently did not do a political
philosophy degree at Chicago because he understood that under
Charles Merriam only a certain view of politics would be considered. McCoy later wrote a review of Merriam's Systematic
Politics, which began-McCoy's book reviews are oftentimes
quite amusing-" After many years of shrewd if not exactly serious thinking, Professor Merriam has reached a conclusion that
is less obvious to a certain type of intellectual than it is to the
man on the street." 4 It is fair to say that the very spirit of
McCoy's work is a defense of the man in the street against a
" certain type of intellectual," in particular the philosophic ideologue grounded in Western thought who is also a politician.
At Chicago also, McCoy became a lifelong friend of Professor
Jerome Kerwin, who directed the famous Walgreen Lectures in
the 1950s, which have become so fundamental in subsequent political philosophy. 5 After his ordination, McCoy did a further
doctorate in Canada under Charles deKoninck at Laval Universlntelligibility, pp. 36, 103, 105, 118, 269.
N. R. McCoy, The Catholic Historical Review 33 (January,
1948), 480.
5 These include, among others, Strauss's Natural Right and History;
Yves
Simon's The Philosophy of Democratic Government; Jacques Maritain's Man
and the State; Eric Voegelin's The New Science of Politics; and Hannah
Arendt's The Human Condition.
3

4 Charles

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ity, where he perfected his already deep studies in St. Thomas.
McCoy subsequently taught at St. Thomas College in Minnesota,
at St. Louis University, was Chairman of the Politics Department
at Catholic University for ten years until 1963, and finally spent
his remaining years at the University of Santa Clara until his
death in 1984.
During the course of his life, Charles N. R. McCoy wrote but
one book, this a formidable one, The Structure of Political
Thought. 6 In addition, he wrote a number, not large, perhaps
twenty, substantial essays in political philosophy, essays which appear in the recently published, On the Intelligibility of Political
Philosophy. 1 McCoy wrote many incisive book reviews, mainly
in the Catho lie Historical Review and in the Modern Schoolman,
with several essays in periodicals like the American Political Science Review, which appeared with only minor changes in The
Structure of Political Thought. The two entries on political
philosophy in The New Catholic Encyclopedia are also written by
McCoy.
The complete list of McCoy's writings does not constitute a
large corpus, to be sure. 8 Yet, it is an extraordinarily rich and
neglected body of clear and incisive thinking on the nature and
meaning of political philosophy as such. I say " political philosophy as such" because McCoy was not a cultural relativist and
understood that the philosophic enterprise is precisely universal. 9
There is thus not a " Chinese " political philosophy and a " Latin
American" political philosophy and a "French" political philosophy. There are political things which may be thought about
6 Charles N. R. McCoy, The Structure
of Political Thought (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1963). This book is currently reprinted by the Greenwood
Press in Westport, Connecticut. See James V. Schall, " ' Man for Himself ' :
On the Ironic Unities of Political Philosophy," Political Science Reviewer
XV (Fall, 1985), 67-108, for a more detailed appreciation of The Structure of
Political Thought.
1 See footnote 1.
8 The complete list of McCoy's writings are found in Intelligibility, pp. 295300.
9 fntelligibility, p. 158.

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by men who may be Chinese, Chilean, or French but all of their
thoughts must he understood and resolved in
way any human
mind must think when it does think. Cultural diversity is not so
radical that it obviates the philosophic project itself. Any alternative to this central core of philosophic truth must result either in
war or skepticism, neither of which is necessary if there is political philosophy as such, which is the universal claim of philosophy.
McCoy represents, if you will, a road not taken either by mainline political philosophy or by theology. His is an appreciation of
the nature and unity of political philosophy that has stood outside
the central currents of politics. In many ways this is fortunate,
since his work as a result bears a certain authenticity and honorableness of philosophical approach that was not a result of the
dying ideologies or their newer forms. The fact remains, however, that McCoy's analysis of the history and nature of political
philosophy is the one that most illuminates its essential and ultimate implications. In his acute insight into the direction of
thought itself, McCoy was able to understand that political philosophy was not merely a kind of massive hodge-podge of different
opinions, none of which were true, but rather a successive taking
of positions which necessarily followed, once certain first principles and conclusions were denied or obscured. In this sense,
then, there is a kind of quiet excitement in following McCoy's
thought as it clearly comes to grips with what are the essential
problems of nature and human life. McCoy was, to follow his
own thinking on liberalism, truly " liberal " in that he did not
take his direction from prevailing conservative opinion or react
against it because it was not elite.10 McCoy's own position thus
does not fall properly within the liberal-conservative dichotomy
into which so much thought in political philosophy is squeezedo
Rather he was one of the few thinkers radical enough to argue
the uniqueness of the Aristotelian-Thomist position as valid precisely because of the theories that deviated from its central meaning. In this sense, political philosophy included the understanding
10

Intelligibility, Chapter 6.

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of what deviated from the human good. McCoy's account of the
intelligibility of the deviations from classic first principles together
with their connection to them was thus itself an argument for the
truth of his position. McCoy was ever conscious of the intelligible
connections of philosophic positions.

III
Political philosophy cannot be set apart from philosophy itself.
Philosophy is concerned with the knowledge of the whole, of
what is. No aspect of philosophy, particularly politics, can itself
be understood apart from this whole about which philosophy is
concerned. Philosophy itself is grounded in the mystery of the
existence of something rather than nothing, in the existence of
this thing which is not that thing, particularly in the reality of a
rational being who, initially, appeared apart from his own making or causality. 11 This mystery of what is is what philosophy
seeks to elucidate. Political philosophy is necessary both as a part
of the whole and as the defense of a civil order in which investigation into the meaning of the whole might be possible. In this
sense, political philosophy is necessary for philosophy, which itself recalls the drama about the death of Socrates, the beginning
of political philosophy properly so called. Not every civil order
allows philosophy. Not every philosophy is about what is.
Philosophy, moreover, may have questions it legitimately asks
but which it cannot itself fully answer, just as political living
may broach questions it cannot itself fathom, those having particularly to do with friendship, punishment, and reward. 12 The
discovery of such questions is, in part, what philosophy and living
itself are about. It is one of the central functions of political
philosophy to allow such questions to be asked, even against a
n See Eric Voegelin, Conversations with Eric Voegelin, Edited by R. Eric
O'Connor (Montreal: Thomas More Institute Papers 76, 1980), pp. 1-20.
12 See James V. Schall, The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes
from Classical, Medieval, and Modern Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1984); What is God Liker (Collegeville, MN:
Michael Glazier /Liturgical Press, 1992).

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regime deliberately constructed against their possibility. This
openness will include, furthermore, the openness to revelation if
reason cannot in principle close off its possibility, which in principle it cannot. 13 Any claimed revelation, however, must itself
stand the test of contradiction, the test of the structure of the mind
itself.14
Philosophers, however, may by fiat close such questions off as
not valid. That is, even in a free polity, philosophers themselves
may refuse to philosophize so that they fail to live their own
truth. Thus, if philosophers, for whatever reason, reject the
metaphysics of being, they act not on account of philosophy,
which, to be authentic, simply must keep the questions open in
their accurate statement even if it does not find the answers, or
does not find them in the manner the philosophers or citizens
might want. Rather any cutting off of philosophical questioning
and answering, in practice, is on account of a will which does not
want to rest in uncertainty, even the uncertainty of faith. A philosopher, or anyone for that matter, may not wish to remain open
to what is, in spite of the fact that this is what intellect as such is,
the faculty capax omnium.
But openness to questioning does not and cannot mean that
everything is true. If everything is true, nothing is true. Consequently, pure will cut off from its moorings in mystery can itself claim to become a power to create an alternative world out
of its own resources. This claim to autonomy is fundamentally
what specifically modern philosophy is about. In this sense, artistic
truth is at war with philosophical truth when both operate from
the premise of the primacy of will.15 Since the will as the ultimate
1a See Leo Strauss, " The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,"
Independent Journal of Philosophy 3 (1979), 111-18; James V. Schall, "Truth
and the Open Society," Order, Freedom, and the Polity: Critical Essays on
the Open Society, Edited by George W. Carey (Lanham, MD: University
Press of America, 1986), pp. 71-90.
14 See Ralph Mclnerny, St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1982), Chapter 5 ; Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas
(Chicago: Gateway, 1957).
1 5 See Charles N. R. McCoy, The Structure of Political Thought (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp. 31-36; 159-66.

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faculty of doing is itself so central to ethical and political action,
it can easily be understood that an alternative world will almost
necessarily be chosen when the world that is is rejected in its intellectual structure. 16 This is why, I think, the word " structure"
appears so prominently in the works of Charles N. R. McCoy. 17
He understood dearly that a will deprived of a truth it did not
create but to which it is oriented will naturally seek to construct
a different world in such a way that it systematically replaces the
natural order with it_s own structured alternative world conceived
by its own creative power. 18

IV
Political philosophy in the modern era is particularly interesting to study because of the manner-itself in need of the intellectually careful accounting which McCoy gave it-in which politics has itself become a substitute for metaphysics, to which
mantle, granted the premises of modernity, it can lay a kind of
legitimate claim for the position of " first " philosophy. This
claim is why McCoy was fond of citing the famous passage from
Book 6 of The Ethics in which Aristotle had observed that, if man
were the highest being, politics would be the highest science
(1141a20-22). Both Aristotle and McCoy thus understood that
since man was not the highest being politics was intrinsically
limited. In this sense, it can be said that the intellectual drive behind the analyses of Charles N. R. McCoy was to demonstrate
how this effort to replace God by man as the cause of human
" being" was, however misguided, in fact feasible and followed
progressively in a structured way from philosopher to philosopher
in that side of political theory that ended in what is generally
called "modernity," or, to use Strauss's term, "the modern
project." 19
Intelligibility, p. 109.
This word, of course, appeared in the title of McCoy's The Structure of
Political Thought. See Intelligibility, pp. 103-04.
18 Intelligibility, p. 157.
19 Leo Strauss, City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964),
16

17

p. 7.

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v
The "queen of the social sciences," Leo Strauss's famous
phrase for politics, has been able (because of Hume in McCoy's
view) to succeed to the post of modern science itself, which had
already claimed to have succeeded metaphysics and eventually
theology. 20 However, if politics has laid claim to all the prerogatives of theology and metaphysics, to the practical as
as to
the theoretical sciences, in the Aristotelian sense of the term, this
is no neutral result. Marx's famous dictum that the purpose of
philosophy is not to understand the world
to change it is per'"
fectly logical if the premises on which it is based are valid. It
was precisely this validity that McCoy was most interested in
examining. 21 McCoy was perfectly aware that the doctrine of the
Incarnation and the Aristotelian idea of substance were insistent
that all genuine philosophy could have a sensual component, as it
were, that political philosophy itself could not ignore the question
of what is the meaning of the world and of the fact that human
beings are not pure spirits and that this combination of matter
and form is not itself an evil.
Leo Strauss taught that we are fortunate if one or two of the
greatest minds who ever lived are alive during the time when
we are alive. He held further that we needed to trace the divergent and conflicting explanations of reality to the few great minds
who originated them. When we will have done this clarification,
we will find that the greatest minds do not agree. 22 This impasse,
of course, brings up the question of which of the greatest thinkers
do we follow? It is the classic position of St. Thomas, following
Aristotle, that this impasse does not exist in principle.
is
to say, the conflicts of the great minds, which are real enough, can
be understood and resolved by examining their source and their
relation to a philosophical common sense rooted in being, to
which the mind is open.
20 Leo Strauss, City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964),
p. l. Structure, pp. 224-35; Intelligibility, pp. 151-52.
2 1 Structure, Chapters 9 and 10; Intelligibility, Chapters 7 and 8.
22 Leo Strauss, " What Is Liberal Education ? " Liberalism: Ancient and
Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 3-8.

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VI
The profoundly Thomistic spirit of the works of Charles N. R.
McCoy flows, not from any slavish following of St. Thomas,
but from a careful analysis of the divergent positions taken in
the history of political philosophy in the light of the analysis of
Aristotle and St. Thomas. By contrast the practical abandonment of St. Thomas particularly in Catholic circles during McCoy's own time makes the work of McCoy in retrospect even
more significant in showing that this abandonment had its own
roots in will, not in reason. Reason remained, in the analysis of
essential issues in political philosophy, on the side of St. Thomas.
It was McCoy's position that if a thing could in fact be understood, whether it be in Locke or in the Stoics, it could be placed
clearly in the arena of that intelligibility which philosophy provided to the human mind. It was St. Thomas's guidance that
enabled McCoy to account for the reasons why philosophic positions were taken. Particularly important in McCoy are the theory
of knowledge and logic, the cause of the distinction of species
and individuals, and the legitimate autonomy of political thought
but under the guidance of contemplative understandings and ends.
The turmoil in the political order, then, was at its deepest
roots not merely an account of " the wickedness of human nature," as Aristotle called it ( 1163b23), or the "ambition and
avarice (that) are the motives of crime " ( 1171a16-17), notions
which became subsumed under the doctrines of the Fall and
Original Sin in Christianity. Rather it arose from a systematic
endeavor to replace and overturn in an act of human political
choice any sign of a " reason " in things placed there by a First
Cause or God. The particularly " political " side of this endeavor
arose from the insufficiency of pure speculation, though that was
necessary to make the idea of a purely " human " world possible in
the first place. Indeed, McCoy saw in the very Roman word
humanitas the beginnings of this movement, a humanity not dependent on anything but itself. 28 Since all of human reality in2a Strncfitre, pp. 82-87.

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eluded more than its rationality, the placing of ideas into the
world necessarily involved removing from the institutions of society, property, government, or religion, any sign of dependence or
origin in something not human. This removal was the ultimate
foundation of revolution in the most dangerous sense of that much
abused word, which of itself merely means to come back to its
beginning like the revolutions of the planets and stars.
No doubt, the principled relativism or skepticism that grounds
so much modern political philosophy, itself subject to acute analysis in The Structure of Political Thought and in McCoy's academic essays, cannot be left without an examination of its stated
origin and meaning. The history of political philosophy may indeed seem at first sight, as Strauss quipped, like a series of
" brilliant errors," but these errors reveal the direction of the
mind that made them. 24 Careful attention to such errors is itself
part of the discipline of political philosophy, as of philosophy itself. What this means, of course, more fundamentally, is attention to the theories of cognition and willing as themselves contributory to the positions taken in political philosophy. 25 Thus,
man is a thinking animal even while he is a social animal, and his
social side, rooted as it is in his reason, will not prosper, will not
complete his being, if he does not think correctly.
The position that there is a right way to think is itself of
course based on the initial refutation of skepticism or relativism,
the mind's affirmation of what is, its inability to think consciously
in contradictions. Democracy in particular has come to be justified precisely on the dogmatic basis that there is no theoretic
truth. In this sense democracy itself contained a totalitarian element, as McCoy saw particularly in Rousseau, though it was alCity and Man, p. 8.
sense, Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1978), with its volume on Thinking and on Willing, stands in the central
line of political philosophy. Unfortunately, McCoy never dealt with the work
of Hannah Arendt, which was an effort to reestablish practical political life.
Her work suffered precisely from the problem with revelation that enabled
St. Thomas and McCoy to establish the authentic life of the city because of the
completion of the contemplative life provided by revelation.
24 Strauss,

'2 5 In this

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ready implicit in Aristotle's definition that "democracy" was
based on a" liberty" which implied no truth (1318b40-19al). 28
Truth, however, is the conformity of the mind with reality, with
a reality that exists independently of the human mind which itself
bears intelligibility of a sort, though not its own sufficient explanation. Since openness to truth itself denies the claim of
skepticism, the political order of any regime, including democracy
in any workable sense, had to have a non-relativist basis. Otherwise there was no escape from the claim of modernity to establish by virtue of its own will what was the order of human existence in the polity.

VII
Perhaps the most recurrent theme in the works of Charles N.

R. McCoy is the notion that nature is a " substitute " intelligence
which requires a first source to explain its own order. This idea
in McCoy comes from St. Thomas's Commentary on the Second
Book of the Physics of Aristotle. 27 The question of the intelligence of nature, its order or lack of one and what this implies,
undergirds the whole of the political philosophy of Charles N. R.
McCoy. If it is possible, at least speculatively, to remove the
cause of the being of things, particularly human being, from nature-a feat which was accomplished (according to McCoy's
analysis) largely by Grotius's dictum that the natural law would
be the natural law even on the supposition that God did not exist,
and by Hume's dictum that the contrary of every matter of fact
is possible-then a way is open to substitute human intelligence
for divine intelligence as the cause for the distinction of things. 28
If the world is not itself previously ordered by a divine intelligence, and if the order of nature reveals only a kind of imitation
or substitute intelligence, then it is the most logical thing in the
world to replace all of nature, including human nature, with a
Structure, pp. 212-21; Intelligibility, Chapters 3 and 5.
Intelligibility, pp. 6, 15, 67, 68, 71, 72, 144, 159; Structure, pp. 6, 33, 36,
42, 91, 93, 163, 191, 211, 249.
2s Structure, pp. 193, 229.
26
27

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higher intelligence, namely human intelligence. Human technology and polity can in some sense claim to fashion everything
that is man so that, wherever he looks (as Marx hoped) man
would only see himself.
Ernst Cassirer, whom McCoy admired greatly and who was
Strauss's mentor, supplied at this point the relation of the intelligibility of the intellect and the autonomy of nature which McCoy
used to understand how it was possible for political philosophy to
elevate itself to the position of first philosophy.29 The reason why
natural things were as they were did not depend on nature itself
but on the First Cause. This is why the first principles in ethics
are like the principles of mathematics, with regard to human
beings, because they are simply given and not subject to the
artistic faculties of man.
McCoy was fond in particular of Cassirer's introductory
chapter to An Essay on Man. 80 In this essay, Cassirer had confronted the question of man's loss of " an intellectual center " in
the history of thought. 31 This loss coincided with the denial of a
relation of cause to the First Being. The search for an intellectual
center ultimately ended up with a concept of collective man in
which everyone was brought together under the notion of speciesbeing, under the notion, that is, that nothing
but what
man made for himself.82
It was because of this particular intellectual analysis that McCoy saw the reasons for "myth and magic," to use Cassirer's
terms for modern political ideologies, reappearing in the modern
era not as primitive concepts, but as the most advanced ones because there was nothing in nature or being to prevent them. 88
The "destruction of metaphysics," which was Heidegger's proposal, enabled McCoy to get behind even Marx and modern liberalism to see a nude or raw nature without any presuppositions
Chapter 9.
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor,
1944).
31 Intelligibility, pp. 14, 154, 177-78, 191.
a2 Intelligibility, pp. 69, 180.
as Intelligibility, p. 72; Structure, pp. 250-51.
29 Intelligibility,
30

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even to man's formable capacities.3 McCoy saw that this "poverty of existence " was the logical consequence of the initial removal of the First Being as the cause of all that is.
Cassirer was also much interested in the difference between
the Stoics and the Christians : the curious fact that the highest
virtue for the Stoics was the highest vice for the Christians so
that the easy connection of Stoicism and Christianity was
not usually intelligently argued. 85 If nature was autonomous because it had no relation to a divine intellect, and if human reason
was to be modeled on this sort of autonomy, then it followed that
there was really no reason for the particular things that did exist.
Anything could in principle be otherwise, including human beings.
Particular beings, especially human beings, existed in St.
Thomas's analysis because of the First Mover or God. Nature
did not as such intend Socrates or Mary except as a means to the
end of keeping the species in existence. If the centrality of interest is in Socrates or Mary, not in the species, which in fact
never exists as such except in the mind, the questions about the
meaning of these particular beings, their friendship with each
other or with God, become the basic focus even of politics whose
purposes is subordinated to the higher ends of the concrete being
of Socrates and Mary. 38
In other words, if Socrates and Mary have a purpose in themselves, then politics-which concerns their actions in this life,
the practical actions-is necessarily limited by the theoretic order
in which the higher questions exist. To put it another way, the
contemplative life in the Greek sense and eternal life in the Christian sense, since they removed certain ultimate issues from the
direct jurisdiction of politics, enabled politics to be itself, that is,
politics, and not some theoretic substitute for the speculative
order.
,i,

M Intelligibility, Chapter 7.

Structure, Chapter 3; Intelligibility, pp. 126, 168, 172. See James V.
Schall, "Post-Aristotelian Philosophy and Political Theory," Cithara 3 (November, 1963), 56-79.
ae Intelligibility, p. 68.
35

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McCoy held that if it was possible to demonstrate how politics
in modernity contrived systematically to replace these higher
ends found in metaphysics and revelation, then we could explain
the dangers and exaggerations of the politics since Machiavelli,
if not since the Stoics and Epicureans. While McCoy did not
deny that there have been good aspects to modernity, those largely
resultant, he thought, from a residual good sense in the populace
and in religion, his primary interest was the explanation of the
generic or counter-being that is proposed as an alternative to the
final end of man as conceived in the Thomist reconstruction of
Aristotle in the light of revelation. The " malleability" which he
saw to be the result of Rousseau's critique, with human nature
ordained to no end but open to formation primarily by society
so that there was no transcendence for each member of the polity,
left mankind defenseless against the political agents willing to
take up the task of the formation of a new man. 37

VIII
From the very beginning, as I have pointed out, it is of some
importance to recognize the great admiration McCoy had for the
philosophers with whom he disagreed-in particular Marx, in
whom he saw a first-class mind quite perceptive of the meaning
of Western theology and philosophy. McCoy was conscious of
the famous sentence from Aristotle, often cited by Aquinas, that
a small error in the beginning led to a large error in the end.
The studies of Charles McCoy were designed to elucidate these
lines of intellectual discourse with great sympathy because he
quite understood how it was possible to think erroneously and yet
think with a certain basis in truth, which St. Thomas said was
the case with all error. VVhether he be treating Marsilius, or
Locke, or Hume, or Kant, what is quite striking in McCoy is the
almost visible delight he seems to have in defining and clarifying
just why it was " reasonable" that tremendous errors were made
in the first place. The other side of this " reasonableness " of
3 7 Intelligibility,

pp. 61, 71-72; Structure, p. 256.

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error, of course, was his awareness that the difficult intellectual
" work " required to figure out just why such positions were
taken also provided a way to correct them.
No doubt, the figure of Aristotle was central for McCoy's understanding of political philosophy. Perhaps nothing separates
him more from both Voegelin and Strauss than his critical stance
concerning Plato in relation to Aristotle. 38 In point of fact, the
Straussian interpretation of Plato makes him much more an
Aristotelian than Aristotle himself ever understood Plato to be.
Also, unlike the same Straussians, who see in St. Thomas a
valuable figure principally because he preserved Aristotle, McCoy
saw the relation of St. Thomas and Aristotle as one of continuity,
yet with the addition of specifically revelational propositions
which, when thought out, caused philosophy to be better in its
own order. The understanding of Aristotle by St. Thomas included an analysis of what Aristotle did mean.39 In McCoy's
view, in this sense, St. Thomas in the end was a better Aristotelian than Aristotle himself, without implying any criticism of
Aristotle in this. The presence of revelational questions simply
forced St. Thomas to read Aristotle carefully enough to decide
what he meant and how his thought might possibly have related
to a legitimate interpretation that was at least possible in Aristotle because it was based on being.
The line of argumentation in McCoy proceeds from Plato to
Aristotle to the post-Aristotelians, in whom he found, with Marx,
the roots of specifically modern political philosophy.40 McCoy
did not spend a good deal of time on the Old Testament except
insofar as it is contained in Christian revelation, though clearly
the doctrines of Creation, the Fall, and a right order of living are
based in it. McCoy then proceeded through St. Augustine and
St. Thomas Aquinas, to the medieval constitutional experience
and its breakdown beginning with Occam and Marsilius of
Padua.
ss fntelligibility, pp. 15, 116; Structure, Chapter 1.
39 The forthcoming book of E. B. F. Midgley on the relation of St. Thomas
to Aristotle is to be awaited with great interest. It is a brilliant analysis.
•o Intelligibility, pp. 169-71.

JAMES V. SCHALL,

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The key figure to begin modernity in political philosophy was,
of course, Machiavelli. McCoy's analysis of Machiavelli was
originally published in The American Political Science Review
some fifteen years before Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli, to
which it must be compared. 41 On the issue of the essential meaning of Machiavelli, McCoy and Strauss were in agreement, and
both understood that in spite of breaking with the religious and
philosophic past, there remained in political philosophy the
vated anticipations caused by revelation which began to run
through politics without moorings in grace or reason sufficient
to tame them.
McCoy's treatment of Machiavelli reappeared (substantially) as
a key chapter in The Structure of Political Thought, which saw
Machiavelli to have been the founder of modern politics because
he reversed the relation of prudence and art in political philosophy.
As a result, the politician was free, as the prudent man was not,
to create his own definition of what man was, for he had only to
conform to the purpose of the politician. McCoy saw the beginnings of this " turning point " in political theory, as he called it,
already in the post-AristoteHans, so the fact that Marx wrote his
dissertation on Epicurus was of momentous import. 42 McCoy
recognized that the Stoics in particular had previously reversed
the relation of the practical and theoretical orders as they had
been understood by Aristotle, so that contemplation was in a
sense subordinate to practice, particularly to politics. The understanding of the meaning of this reversal was, in fact, the main
meaning of Roman political theory, which placed duty to the society over the task of philosophy.
41 Charles N. R. McCoy, "The Place of Machiavelli in the History of Political Thought," The American Political Science Review 37 (1943), 626-41. Leo
Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1958). See
also Jacques Maritain's "The End of Machiavellianism," in The Social and
Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain, Edited by Joseph W. Evans and
Leo R Ward (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976).
42 Charles N. R. McCoy, "The Turning
Point in Political Philosophy,"
The American Political Science Review 44 (September, 1950), 678-88; Struct11re, Chapter 3.

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Thus, the reversal of contemplation and practice, and within
practice the reversal of the relation of prudence and art, was the
theoretic grounding for a process that would eventually involve
freeing the intellect to seek to place into being the sort of being
man now configured for himself. This was a human being unalienated in the sense that he recognized no dependence on any
order he did not himself create. The analysis of this sort of possibility was in fact the work and significance of Hobbes. 48 " In
contemporary social science Hobbes's ambition 'to insinuate and
impose upon men ... a vocabulary of ethics, law, and politics entirely neutral in tone ' has been accomplished." 44
McCoy held that the central theme of any political philosophy
that had rejected in principle the classic Aristotelian view of the
First Mover and its relation to nature, which only had a substitute
intelligence, was to recover its " intellectual center." Basically,
this was the line of thought that went from the post-Aristotelians,
to Marsilius, Machiavelli, Grotius, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Feuerbach, Marx, and Heidegger. This attempted recovery on its own
premises contrary to classical and Christian thought could only be
accomplished intellectually and ultimately also sensually. This
meant that in Christian terms, the place of the Incarnation or its
substitute remained to be discovered in a new way for a being who
was precisely from nature a rational and sensuous animal. The
violence of modern revolution, in McCoy's view, arose from this
metaphysical root. That is, thought had to pass into action and
this action had to confront any order of being rooted in something other than man's autonomy.

IX
I have already mentioned that the primarily Aristotelian treatment of Plato by McCoy placed him in some conflict with the
Voegelinian and Straussian schools for which he had in principle
much sympathy. Actually, McCoy never mentioned Voegelin
but his treatment of Strauss (Intelligibility, Chapter 10) deserves
43 Structure, pp. 197-203.
44

Jntelligibility, p. 163.

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some comment. 45 McCoy noted that the " metaphysical squabbles" found in American political science have been especially
"bitter and perplexing" over the work of Leo Strauss. 46 The
controversy concerns Strauss's famous preference for Plato over
Aristotle as the basis of political philosophy. This preference was
what grounded Strauss's placing of the philosopher, not the politician or saint, at the highest ranks of human good. McCoy, consistent with his whole work, was attentive to Strauss's
for the philosopher's as the highest vocation. McCoy noted
Strauss's explanation for why he did not consider St. Thomas's
philosophical reflections to be of value for the philosopher. That
is, Strauss held, they must be rejected by the philosopher because
they seemed to require a faith Strauss did not himself possess.47
In McCoy's view, this position was itself taken because of a failure of Strauss to understand that the sobriety of Aristotle was
itself based on the realization that nature did possess a kind of
substitute intelligence. Strauss wanted to keep the city in speech
as the only natural city. The philosopher's dignity depended upon
this exalted location of the "perfect moral order." 48
McCoy approached this Straussian position from an analysis
of the good as it existed in speech and in being. He pointed out
that the study of good as such, as existing, " does not belong to
political science, but to a science concerned with another level of
being, to metaphysics and theology." 49 McCoy had recalled that
actual human beings do not act according to the sort of pure
justice that exists in the city in speech. It was better in fact to be
Plato's cousin than his brother. Nature must not be understood
as a " standard," that is, as a norm whereby everyone will receive
exactly what is due in the city in speech, but as an " authority,"
which means that nature's reasons are not fully to be found in
45 See James V. Schall, "Reason, Revelation, and Politics: Catholic Reflections on Strauss," Gregorianum 62 (1981), # 2, 349-66, # 3, 467-98.
46 /ntelligibility, p. 132.
47 Intelligibility, p. 142.
48 /ntelligibility, p. 140.
49 /bid.

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the world or in justice but require for their explanation an action
of the First Cause to explain their total being. Thus, " inequality " may in fact be in some sense natural, without which the
world could not exist. 50 The diversity of individuals and species
is not itself an evil. Aristotle recognized that politics had its own
status within the structure of being. Politics was not to be absorbed by philosophy, nor make philosophy impossible. The logical good itself, not the ontological analogous good, seemed to McCoy to be Strauss's model for understanding being.
Thus the antagonism between politics and philosophy which
Strauss noted was not, in McCoy's view, "uncovered by
Strauss." 51 Why?
In Aristotle's philosophy the ultimate reasons for things are not
found subjectified in the things of which the world is composed. This
Aristotelian position prepares the way, of course, for the Thomistic
view of natural right, which is rooted in Aristotle's natural theology
and brought to completion by revealed theology. This is a position
and a consequence unacceptable to Strauss. 52

It is this openness in principle of philosophy to revelation (in a
non-contradictory fashion) that grounded the difference between
McCoy and Strauss. It is also the root of Strauss's attachment
to Plato. The failure to understand the difference between the
characteristics of logical and ontological being at the level of the
best regime or the failure to grasp that Aristotle's best regime
leaves politics intact, with all its imperfections, causes the attraction of the philosophic " madness " of a Plato-" the immoderation of thought that Strauss calls a virtue in Plato: the immoderation of thought that asserts that something is which in reality is
not." 53
Strauss did not, in McCoy's view, treat the various levels of
being on their own terms, particularly ontological being, but also
the kind of politics that exists in all actual cities, where liberty of
Intelligibility, p. 139.
p. 141.
52 Intelligibility, p. 142.
53 Intelligibility, p. 147.
50

51 Intelligibility,

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choice is fundamental to the beings who compose them. 54 In a
famous phrase, McCoy concludes that " Strauss drinks wine with
Plato and hemlock with Socrates." 55 By this McCoy meant that
the city in speech, which is the only " natural " city for Strauss,
for a philosopher, who is fired by that wine which leads to the
madness of its existence, will result-in actual cities-in the death
of the philosopher because the philosopher does not see that he is
himself trying to maintain a divine task. The concessions to moderation which Strauss maintained for actual politics, which in
Aristotle have their own justifications from actual nature-no one
calls common property" mine "-do not suggest that the location
of the city in speech can be anywhere else but in the obscure desires of the philosopher. 56 This calculated obscurity seems to prevent a frank discussion, in the mode of the proper location of the
city in speech. That is, it fails to allow that the limits of philosophy are themselves found in that ontological good that causes
all good things that are.

x
Another area in which the work of McCoy has been neglected
is that of the relation of popular theological-political activism and
political philosophy. McCoy in fact confessed some " sympathy "
for liberation theology. 51 That sympathy, however, was far different from what might at first sight be expected, as it was rooted
in the more general thesis of McCoy that Marx, in a kind of
perverted but logical fashion, did recognize that all being had an
intelligence to it and that all being belonged together in some
whole. Cut off from the avenues of metaphysics, Marx proposed
the human intellect as the spiritual power capable of supplying
this need. The classic notion of the primacy of the spiritual, however, meant that man participated in the divine being both by
B4 Intelligibility, p. 148.
H

Intelligibility, p. 149.

ns Intelligibility, pp. 144-45, 148.
5 7 Intelligibility, p. 266. See James V. Schall, Liberation Theology (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982).

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doing and by knowing. 58 For Aristotle, knowing or contemplation was the end of human being, but acting was also an imitation of the divine creative power in making what is not God. Man
participated in reality both in knowing and in acting. 59
McCoy had argued that modern political philosophy up to
Marx had not really understood the primacy of the spiritual, that
is, of the seeing of all things as originating in a single Being
who determined by a non-necessary will the ranks and distinctions of things to which the human mind is open and through
which all things returned to their source. McCoy understood that,
without an understanding of the right order of this relationship,
a substitute order would be desperately sought out. While Marx
in particular, then, is correctly understood to be a " materialist "
philosopher, nevertheless, his materialism is different in that it reveals a seeking for some intelligence that will rescue both man
and nature from being mere atoms in a void.
Marx, no doubt, turned the classic position upside down, but
the very fact that he could do so implied that he was concerned
that some overall unity of action and contemplation be restored
in being.
As I have been attesting, this profound spiritual root of the concept
of political common good has been lost in the West in modern times.
We have come to the impression that the Classical-Christian tradition has man bereft of a definition that relates him to the larger
rhythms of nature and community. The contrary is true. Indeed,
the theological principles that we have been examining present us
with a kind of contemplation that passes into practice.
Alone, among the modern political philosophers, Marx retained-if,
indeed, in a profoundly perverted form-this theological element of
the Classical-Christian tradition: the primacy of the " spiritual."
Marx saw that the Enlightenment had indeed repudiated " the essentiality of God," but that it had not affirmed " the essentiality of man."
It left man indeed with a freedom of conscience that must make itself the decisive religious attitude and thus threw religion on the refuse heap of arbitrary private whims. The primacy of the spiritual
is retained by Marx's acclaiming the "essentiality of man." Man's
5B

fntelligibility, p. 280-81.
p. 270.

59 Intelligibility,

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religious freedom is, with Marx, achieved by affirming his own
"self-origin" and himself as being. Man comes to see that he is all
that he knows and that he is the act whereby all things are
all things humanly significant, which becomes the totality of significance. 60

Needless to say, this global position of including all things human
within man's own making gives them a curious inner-worldly
intelligibility and serves to illuminate them from the presumably
dead hand of a nature deprived, as a result of modern philosophy
and contrary to Aristotle and St. Thomas, of any even substitute
intelligence of its own. The " spirituality" of man is his own
spirit, not the divine spirit. The Divine has been closed off from
consideration by what Voegelin called Marx's "prohibition of
questions " about the adequacy of man's completely self-contained
world which, as McCoy recognized, aspired to spiritual solace
through intelligible meaning. 61
McCoy had begun these reflections on liberation theology by
commenting on a suggestion which argued that Christianity had
no moral notion of citizenship. McCoy with some impatience
called this position " incredible and simply absurd." 62 In another
review in The Thomist-of a book on liberation theologyMcCoy explained why the classic accusation that Christianity was
not concerned with this world was in fact a false one. McCoy in
fact held that the Marxist understanding of this concern with the
world was not so dissimilar from the Christian view revealed in
the classical writers. Indeed, Christianity may be the origin of
the Marxist concern on this same point.
Mr. Petulla [Joseph Petulla, Christian Political Thi!'ology: A Marxian Guide (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1972)] seems to feel that religious
values of themselves are inadequate to furnish significant interpretation of man's :role in "the construction of the world." The great
early theologians are accused of failing " to include provisions for
social change in the temporal order" (p. 10). One wonders what
so Intelligibility, pp. 270-71.
61 Eric
Voegelin, Science, Po/fries, mid Gnosticism
1968)' p. 57.
62 Intelligibility, p. 267,

(Chicago:

Gateway,

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Mr. Petulla would make of the text of St. Thomas which reads:
"The world was made to be man's dwelling. Therefore it should
benefit man. . . . Man has some likeness to the universe; wherefore
he is called a little world. Hence man loves the whole world naturally, and consequently desires its good. Therefore, that man's desire be satisfied the universe must needs ... be made better." The
renewal of the world after the Last Judgment is made to serve as
an inspiration to man to change the world now: St. Thomas insists
that politics is concerned not only with " government " of the status
quo but with creating a perfect society by continually renewing its
structures (Chapter XIII, On the Rule of Princes). St. Augustine,
to whom Mr. Petulla imputes the view that " the history of the earthly city will never improve," called upon men to care for and to distribute earthly goods in imitation of " that most just Disposer of all
the adjuncts of temporal peace-the visible light, the breathable air,
the potable water, and all the other necessaries of meat, drink, and
clothing." 68
This theme was a familiar one in McCoy's general treatment of
St. Augustine. 64
What McCoy was concerned about in both of these comments
on liberation theology was the phenomenon of Christians, not
knowing their own tradition in its philosophic depths, in their
enthusiasm coming to embrace positions in modernity that substituted implicitly for Christianity itself in their attempt to do
what Christianity not only claimed to do but was able to do better in a more complete philosophic understanding and in humane
civil practice.

XI
One of the unique theses found in McCoy's papers was his
discussion of what he called the " counter-culture " of the late
1960s and early 70s. 65 The Counter-Culture, as McCoy read it,
was a reaction to modernity itself and to the intellectual positions
that had progressed from the post-Aristotelians, to Marsilius, to
Charles N. R. McCoy, Review in The Thomist 27 (July, 1973), 625.
N. R. McCoy, "St. Augustine," History of Political Philosophy,
Edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963),
pp. 151-59
65 [ntelligibility, Chapters 11 and 12.
63

6 4 Charles

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Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel,
Marx, and finally Heidegger. This body of modern ideas included both scientific and political theory as part of the same
cultural understanding which sought to separate man from nature
and replace any order in being with man's own will as the cause
of what is. Marx's ambition of seeing man everywhere, of seeing
that what existed was caused by man's labor, that everyone belonged to everyone because all that existed was a product of
man's work, was everywhere dominant in varying forms, not all
of which were specifically Marxist.
The Counter-Culture's " sense of life," as McCoy saw it, was
an intelligible, even expected, reaction to this direction of modernity precisely, if perhaps blindly, back in the direction of Aristotle.
That is, far from there being no mysterious intelligible being in
nature, there was in fact some sort of order. Things did not in
fact (the practical Aristotle observed) just happen in any old
manner. McCoy recalled Aristotle's notion that natural beings
had a regularity, an apparent intelligence which was present but
was not conscious to itself. Following some brilliant observations
of Charles deKoninck about the regathering of matter into intelligence in plant, animal, and human life, with the reordering of
all nature to man, McCoy was able to point out that the CounterCulture was onto some truth that was neglected in modern philosophy.
McCoy did not want to eradicate the order of nature's species
to each other. This order revealed an inter-relationship in an ascending order which was the firm root of Aristotle and of the
Judaeo-Christian revelation. This elimination of any understanding of the interconnection of things in nature had been effected
in modern philosophy but was at least beginning to be rejected
by the Counter-Culture in so far as it was not merely a return to
the earlier Enlightenment, but a realization that nature displays
its own intelligence even though it is not its own cause. The recovery of the full explanation of nature's order does not lie within
itself and necessitates a return to metaphysics and revelation.
The Counter-Culture did not go in this direction, of course, but

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McCoy's analysis of it demonstrated that there were genuine
lines of philosophic import that could well have led to a return to
more classical traditions.

XII
McCoy's understanding of Burke and conservatism was likewise revealing. Like Strauss, McCoy held that both conservatism
and liberalism were two sides of the same coin. They represented
the consequences of an understanding of nature cut off from any
transcendent ordering principle. McCoy's problem with Burke
had to do with Burke's rejection of metaphysical rights for what
were real historical rights. Both Aristotle and St. Thomas, of
course, understood that all law had to be seen in its circumstances
to be fully understood without at the same time allowing the circumstance to obscure the central principle of what was at stake
in the law.
The philosophical presuppositions of Burke, in McCoy's view,
were precisely those of a nature i'.self cut off from any higher
ordering power. This autonomous nature of custom in particular
meant that the criterion of what was the right way to act was
the long tradition. "Moral truth finds its measure in conformity
of the reason with what is, and not in conformity of the desires
with what is known to be truly good." 66 This conclusion meant
that Burke could, because of long custom, approve customs and
morals which were in fact wrong by philosophic or revelational
analysis. This position was the root of McCoy's problem with
Burke.
The fact that the customs of western peoples included practices from revelation prevented them from quickly deviating from
the criterion of the right, but no principle in theory prevented
this dangerous direction. The modern liberal, of course, generally
formed the criterion of his action by reacting against these same
customs which were mere repetitious actions with no intrinsic
intelligibility 67
Structure, p. 246.
er Structure, pp. 250-59.
66

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Finding the principle or reason of the political art in some natural
power of " a permanent body composed of transitory parts,'' Burke
placed the ends of human life out of man's self as human. Practical
truth for Burke is measured, as indeed it was for Hume and Smith,
by conformity with what is-society's standards- not by conformity
with what is known to be the true human good. The result was to
leave political matters free from the scrutiny of human reason as
ordering and directing to an end known to be good and realized
through good acts, habits, laws, institutions; and to turn them over
to " a power out of themselves." 68
McCoy did not identify the kind of abstract reasoning that Burke
objected to in the Revolution and the Enlightenment with the kind
of reasoning in Aristotle and St. Thomas.
Whether Burke needs to be interpreted so harshly is a matter
of some debate. Efforts to defend Burke consist in identifying his understanding of nature with that of Aristotle and St.
Thomas. However, the essential danger of a relativist conservatism is not at all an imaginary one. McCoy did not reject the
importance of custom or tradition but realized that it was necessary for custom itself to be subject to some principle of intelligibility. The " what is " of the ethical and political order of beings with the liberty of contrariety in their very metaphysical
make-up will naturally include much deformity and disorder. Indeed, it was this disorder that necessitated St. Thomas' s principle of law that it ought not to prohibit all vices or demand all
virtues (I-II, 92, 1; 96, 2). The highest ethical life of man was
in this sense beyond normal politics and ought to remain so. The
principle of toleration, however, did not mean that these less than
good actions should be approved in the speculative order. It was
this approval that McCoy saw in Burke.
XIII
Charles N. R. McCoy took up the question of natural right
and natural law in various contexts. The lines of political philosophy, he insisted, needed to be kept clear and the issues ines Structure, p. 249.

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tellectually defined. To say the least, he disliked fuzziness. He
once began a review of a book unfortunately called American
Democracy and Natural Law with this sentence: "It is difficult
to review a book which is utterly wanting in an understanding of
the subject with which it purports to deal." 69 Here is how he
saw the problem of treating natural law carelessly. It is a passage
that reveals some glimpse of the personality that was Charles
N. R. McCoy:
Miss Le Boutillier describes two interpretations of natural law which
have come down through history. One of these she takes to be the
" traditional " one, and she ascribes it to Plato (not to Aristotle),
Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, the neo-Kantians, and Jacques Maritain; she calls this one a " metaphysical wonder," a " congery of assumed absolutes." The other interpretation of natural law takes the
" natural law " to be a " human construct," won through a long
struggle for freedom, " pragmatically designed in the interest of
utility." The first interpretation, she says, is like a fog; and it certainly is. The second, she says, is like a fresh breeze, nay more, " a
rushing and mighty wind." And it is; it is like a great deal of wind.
Through this wind and fog we see David Hume and Oliver Wendell
Holmes bringing "to sharpest focus " the natural law doctrine of
Aristotle. To see this one's vision must be blurred by fog and wind. 70
Such an understanding of natural law, McCoy felt, was really
hopeless. He was clearly exasperated at the lack of philosophical
sophistication it revealed.
McCoy himself, however, recognized in natural law, jus
gentium, and positive law a consistent understanding of political
things and which things are due to reason, which to common
understanding, and which to freedom. It is of some importance
to understand what McCoy meant by natural law, though his understanding is that of St. Thomas.
For just as human law, as a rule and measure of acts whereby man
is induced to act or is restrained from acting, takes its principle from
69 Charles N. R. McCoy, Review of Cornelia Greer Le Boutillier, American
Democracy and Natural Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950),
in Catholic Historical Review 37 (July, 1951), 202.
10 Ibid.

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JAMES V. SCHALL,

S.J.

human reason which is the rule and measure of human acts, so the
rule and measure of all the acts and movements that are to be found
in each single created thing has its principle in the Divine reason by
which all created things are ruled and measured. Hence this law,
which is the exemplar of divine wisdom as directing all actions and
movements, is called the " eternal law "; and this same law, as found
in the things that are ruled and measured by it, is called the " natural
law." 71
Clearly, this " natural " law does not exist in things by virtue of
their own fashioning. This situation also holds for the rational
being, who can, nevertheless, understand that there is a reason
for the order of his own being and his being intelligent. To act
in accordance with natural law, in this sense, is thus merely to do
what is reasonable, while recognizing that reason itself is given,
not made by the rational animal.
McCoy understood the breakdown of natural law theory into
modern autonomous rights theory to be caused initially by the
removal of the First Cause as the origin of the being of things.
This elimination left the order of nature with no real grounding
for its being what it is.
In the dassical and medieval understanding of natural law, law as an
ordinatio rationis ad 'bonum commune (an ordination of reason to
the common good) was taken to be an inclination toward the good
conceived as consisting essentially in (a) the efficient and material
principles presupposed to some form, (b) the form by which a thing
is what it is, and ( c) an inclination to action in accordance with the
form. Now this whole teleology, resting, as it did, on the concept of
law as ordinatio rationis, was essentially dependent on the Prime Intellect. Law being something that pertains to the reason and not to
nature (unless it be a rational nature) there can be no natural law
for nonrational beings except by way of similitude. If then law, as
an inclination toward the good, consisted in efficient and material
principles for the sake of some form, and form for the sake of action,
the elimination of the Prime Intellect upon which the order of things
depends leaves the " substitute intelligence" of nature and removes
the element of order to an end as such from the law of nature. 72
11

Intelligibility, p. 22.

12 Intelligibility, p. 76.

POLITICAL

PHILOSOPHY

OF .CHARLES

N. R. MC COY

93

Thus, it is in this reasoning of McCoy that he discovered the
lines of intelligibility that followed in modern political philosophy
once the Prime Intellect was removed from both nature and
human nature. Reasoning about order will end in simple autonomy, in being not goodness, so that the difference between classic
natural law and modern natural right, in its deepest sense, is
found here in the inability to see that the order of nature itself
has an origin and is related to the human intellect as what it has
received, not what it has made.

XIV
The political philosophy of Charles N. R. McCoy, in conclusion, is unique and of central importance for three reasons : 1) In
it, the whole of reality, reason, nature, and revelation are found
in their articulated and consistent relationships. 2) The major
positions taken in political philosophy are interrelated, so that the
function of the political philosopher is initially to trace out and
understand the controverted issue and its relation to a broader
philosophical whole. 3) The classical philosophy of Aristotle is
the key in understanding the reasons why political philosophy in
particular has theoretic consistency.
There is, of course, no necessary relation between the truth
of a philosophic discourse and its popularity or fame. McCoy's
work stands by itself. What is to be claimed for it, above all, is
that it is relevant both to political philosophy and to revelation,
both of which have found persistent problems in their self-understanding because of positions taken, in fact, in political philosophy.
McCoy has the advantage of having attended to many of these
problems as they were working themselves out in the public
forum. Moreover, it is important to realize that the small error
in the beginning leading to large errors in the end (the principle
of both Aristotle and St. Thomas) is the justification of the
analysis of a thinker like McCoy, who was attentive to those
oftentimes abstruse sounding arguments in ancient texts or in the
fine points of logic or metaphysics.

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S.J.

However much we might be appalled by the consequence of
Marx or Hobbes or Machiavelli, the fact remains that these
thinkers were wrestling with issues that can be traced to arguments in the classics, particularly in Aristotle. Moreover, McCoy
found that the elaboration or correction by St. Thomas of this or
that point in Aristotle itself proved central to understanding a
later turn in political philosophy. Academic work, at its best, is
never easy. Yet it is often astonishingly fascinating when it discovers the consistencies and reasons for the enormous philosophical or political mistakes of great thinkers. In examining the
work of Charles N. R. McCoy this sense of consistent astonishment and fascination will appear again and again to the diligent
reader who takes his guidance through political philosophy seriously. McCoy recovers what was lost and shows why it was lost.
In this sense, he is also a thinker who can reorient political philosophy into paths that it deviated from at its own peril. And
finally, if it is true that theology itself cannot be fully itself without a true philosophy, the overly politicized theologies of recent
decades will find their natural critique in the analyses and structure of the political thought of Charles N. R. McCoy. McCoy
points these theologies back to that system of limits yet openness
to being that characterized the great thinkers at their best.
McCoy did realize that the history of political philosophy was
an intellectual endeavor to understand the dangers of not properly relating ethics to politics. That this failure had consequences
of the greatest import may be surprising, but in his detailed treatment McCoy demonstrated how efforts to establish an alternative
relationship to the one forged by Aristotle and elaborated by St.
Thomas led to a substitute metaphysics which too many have
thought must be realized by political power. The purpose of McCoy's work was to indicate how St. Thomas's political philosophy
within the context of his whole work could secure the foundations of "humane living".
" Transcendent man in the limited city " means that man is not
limited to the city. His very life in the city leads him by necessity
to an articulation of being that is open to what is beyond the city.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

OF CHARLES N. R. MC COY

95

Man is left free and open to respond to the meaning of a life
that, while being more than politics, is nonetheless attuned to a
common life and a common good. To do politics it is not ultimately enough to do only politics. On the other hand, politics has
its proper dignity and worthiness. However, it can easily be
corrupted by philosophers who do not themselves understand the
limits of this world. Aristotle was right: the greatest dangers
to any polity, as to revelation itself, themselves arise from
philosophy.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE USE OF RIGHTS
LANGUAGE IN PRE-MODERN
CATHOLIC SOCIAL THOUGHT
BERNARD

V. BRADY

University of St. Thomas
St. Paul, Minnesota

C

ONTEMPORARY CATHOLIC social thought, both in
official documents and in commentaries, has focused
quite extensively on describing the use, meaning and
justification of human rights. Indeed, as one significant contributor has suggested, human rights have become, since the Second
Vatican Council, the "central norms of social morality." 1 In all
of this concern for the place of rights within Catholic thought,
however, very little work has been done to explore the pre-modern
roots of this moral category. This essay attempts to address this
issue. The essay has three parts. The first section considers characteristics of rights language within the thought of Thomas
Aquinas. The second section looks at the use of rights within the
intriguing controversy of the late thirteenth century surrounding
apostolic poverty. Finally, developments in Catholic rights language found in the work of the Renaissance figures Vitoria and
Suarez are studied. The essay narrates the development in the
use of rights within the tradition while suggesting certain threads
of consistency.

Thomistic Characteristics of the Use, Meaning and
Justification of Rights Language
In the social philosophy of Thomas Aquinas ( 1225-74), the
concept " ius," or " right," has an important and nuanced role.
1 David Hollenbach, " Both Bread and Freedom:
The Interconnection of
Economic and Political Rights in Recent Catholic Thought," in Human Rights
and the Global Mission of the Church, ed. Arthur J. Dyck (Boston: Boston
Theological Institute, 1985), 31.

97

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Generally, ius suggests an objective reality, as when it is used in
the concept of ius naturale, yet Thomas often uses the word interchangeably with "lex", or "law", a word fundamentally referring to the rational expression of such an objective reality. 2
Most significantly from a modern perspective, Thomas also describes this objective reality of ius within the context of personal
relations. Specific persons have specific rights in accord with
their position within society. This section will examine the meaning of the term ius in Thomas. It will be shown that Thomas used
ius primarily in an objective sense, that is, in terms of "that
which is right," or " that which is fitting." It will also be suggested that Thomas used ius in something of a subjective sense as
referring to personal moral claims. This latter use was, however,
dependent on a prior understanding of "that which is right."
"Right,'' says Thomas, "is the object of justice." 3 Operating
from the principle that if one knows the end or the object of a
thing one can know the reality of that thing, Thomas introduces
his treatise on justice 4 with a consideration of the reality toward
which justice tends-the right. As with the other cardinal virtues, justice seeks to actualize the right or the fitting as it orders
a person in relation to some object. The distinguishing characteristic of justice is that the object under consideration is another
person. He writes, " Accordingly that which is right in the works
of the other virtues, and to which the intention of the virtue tends
as to its proper object, depends on its relation to the agent only,
whereas the right in a work of justice, besides its relation to the
agent, is set up by its relation to others." 5
Thomas describes justice as a habit flowing from a rightly
ordered self which in turn rightly orders one's relations with
others. That is, the just person, through "a constant and per2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2a, 2ae, q. 57, art. 1, trans. Fathers
of the English Dominican Province, 3 vols. (New York: Benzinger Brothers,
1947). See also Thomas Gilby, The Political Thought of Thomas Aquinas
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Midway Reprints, 1973), 121.
a Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2a, 2ae, q. 57, art. 1.
4 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 57-122.
5 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 57, art. 1.

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petual will,'' 6 gives to another that which is due in accord with
" some kind of equality" 7 "adjusted to or commensurate with
... [the other] person." 8 Even as Thomas states, "the act of
justice in relation to its proper matter and object is indicated in
the words, ' Render to each one his right,' " 9 he is speaking of
right in an objective sense. The right is the fair, equitable, proper,
fitting, and just; 10 and as such it is normative. All relations (including one's "relations" with oneself) are to be rightly ordered
so as to reflect that which is right.
Thomas also speaks of ius in terms of specific things that are
due to particular persons. He uses ius to describe moral claims,
powers and privileges to which a person is legitimately entitled.
P. H. Hering cites fourteen such instances. 11 For example,
Thomas speaks of the right of ministers to receive tithes, 12 the
right of the man in Matthew 13 :44 who found a hidden treasure
in a field to possess the whole treasure after he bought the field,13
the right of a baptized person to "approach the Lord's Table," 14
and the right an adopted child has of " succeeding to the adopter's
goods." 15 Some specific claims, however, are illegitimate.
Thomas states, for example, that a slave " has no right to rebel " 16
against a master, and a " wife has no right to ask " her husband
to pay the debt of marriage if he is " rendered incapable of pays Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 58, art. 1.
Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 57, art. 1.
8 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 57, art. 3.
a Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 58, art. 1.
10 See Elmer Gelinas, "Ius and Lex in Thomas Aquinas," The American
Journal of Jurisprudence 15 (1970): 154-170.
11 P. H. Hering,
" De iure subiective sumpto apud Sanctum Thomam,"
Angelicum 16 (April 1939) : 296-298. Hering claims that Thomas's use of such
terms as "licitum est, potestas, facultas, posse" suggests Thomas did grasp
the meaning of subjective right even beyond his explicit use of ius.
12 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2a, 2ae, q. 87, art. 3.
13 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 66, art. 5. See also 2a, 2ae, q. 62, art. 1 for right of
dominion.
14 Ibid., 3a, q. 67, art. 2.
15 Ibid., Suppl. q. 57, art. 1.
1s Ibid., la, 2ae, q. 58, art. 2.
1

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ing the debt ... through having already paid the debt." 17 These
examples suggest that certain persons can (or cannot) make certain claims on others; that is, certain persons have (or do not
have) specific rights in relation to other persons.
There is a creative tension in Thomas's thought between objective and personal uses of ius. An important example of this,
which bears heavily on modern Catholic social thought, is
Thomas's discussion of private ownership. After arguing that
persons, on account of human reason and will, have " a natural
dominion over external things," 18 Thomas states that it is fitting
both for persons to own property-" this is necessary for human
life" 19-and for persons to possess things in common so one "is
ready to communicate them to others in their need." 20 The
former statement is justified by Thomas on what might be called
reasons of social economy, for when persons own property " a
more peaceful state is ensured," "human affairs are conducted in
a more orderly fashion," and the community is better off because
persons " are more responsible for goods when they possess
them." 21 Private ownership was understood to be the result of
human agreement or human authority negotiating the order of
goods over which persons by their very nature have dominion. 22
Quoting Aquinas,
... if a particular piece of land be considered absolutely, it contains
no reason why it should belong to one man more than to another,
but if it be considered in respect of its adaptability to cultivation, and
the unmolested use of the land, it has a certain commensuration to
be the property of one and not of another man.28
11 Ibid., Suppl. q. 64, art.

1.
1.

18 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 66, art.

19 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 66, art. 2.
:20 Ibid.

See also la, 2ae, q. 95, art. 5 for " common possession of all things."

2 1 Ibid.
'22 Gilby comments in The Political Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 155, "Some
kind of right to property [for Thomas] resided in the individual not granted
by the organized group . . . Its extent, here more here less, was to be settled
by social authority."
2a Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2a, 2ae, q. 57, art. 3.

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Thomas justifies private ownership of property by appealing
to the nature of the person in relation to creation, to "prudential " reasons (modern sense of the term) of social economy and,
more specifically, to the authority of human reason. These justifications hold so much weight that " the theft of a small thing
such as a needle or a quill" may be a mortal sin. 24 Thus, it is
right (read: fitting or proper) that people privately own things,
and subsequently there are conditions warranting personal rights
(read : moral claims) to own specific things.
The other fitting relation between persons and property is that
possessions ought to be held in common so persons can care for
the poor. People own temporal goods and are to use such goods
to satisfy personal needs, to provide for the needs of those in
their charge and to practice stewardship. 25 Though Thomas cites
Basil and Ambrose, he might well have called on a litany of
Patristic writers to proclaim the significance of this obligation. 26
The obligation to care for the poor is not a counsel for Thomas,
nor is it an option; it is law. 27 The use of one's private possessions is conditional; we must use our goods to help those in need.
The conditional nature of the right to private property is illustrated by Thomas through the following examples. A judge can
order that one's property be confiscated. 28 Princes can " exact
from their subjects that which is due to them for the safe-guarding of the common good." 29 Victors of a just war may claim
the spoils. 3° Finally, and perhaps most interesting, it is lawful
for a person " in immediate danger . . . to succor his own need
by means of another's property." 31 Rectifying injustice, the common good, and the extreme need of another are all instances
66, art. 6.
5.
26 See Peter C. Phan, Message of the Fathers of the Church: Social Thought
(Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1984), especially 28-29, 35-41.
21 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2a, 2ae, q. 32, art. 5.
28 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 66, art. 5.
29 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 66, art. 8.
so Ibid.
s1 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 66, art. 7.
24 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q.

25 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 32, art.

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which negate an individual's right of dominion and justify the
transferal of that right (and the property) to another. The owner
of property can make valid claims and has valid interests to protect against others, but others likewise can make valid claims
against the owner.
Legitimate personal claims are located for Thomas within objective social positions. The ultimate justification for these claims
rests on the authority of God as evident in. the natural ordering
of human existence, that is, on Thomas's natural law theology.
Though these claims, says Thomas (using lex and ius interchangeably here), " are of human right," 32 that is, they are of
human law, the justification for such claims does not rest on
the particular law of a society any more than it rests on the autonomous authority of the particular individual. The claims cited
above are legitimated for Thomas by the fact that they are made
by members of society in reference to their position in society.
Thus clergy "have a right to the expenses of their ministry," 33
and those who rightly own property have a " right of dominion "
over their possessions. 34
The claims persons, including the prince, can make are limited
by the objective elements of justice. As Frederick Copleston
states:
The right of any creature to direct another, whether it be the right
of the father of the family over the members of the family or of the
sovereign over his subjects, is founded on reason and must be exercised according to reason: as all power and authority is derived
from God and is given for a special purpose, no rational creature is
entitled to exercise unlimited, capricious or arbitrary authority over
another rational creature. 35
For Thomas, personal rights could not be understood apart from
the objective right. Such claims presupposed an interpretation of
3 2 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 87, art. 3.

Ibid., 2a, 2ae, q. 62, art. 1.
Copleston, A History of Philosophy, volume 2, Mediaeval
Philosophy: Augustine to Scotus (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press,
1962), 42L
M

35 Frederick

RIGHTS IN PRE-MODERN

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" that which is right." Thus the list of rights Hering cites is
relative to specific contexts. They are claims describing what is
appropriately due to specific persons in specific relationships.
The use of rights language that characterized medieval feudalism (found in various manifestations from the ninth through
thirteenth centuries), is, on a formal level, similar to Thomas's
use of rights. Feudal rights, grounded on contracted relations between lords and vassals, were publicly recognized claims ordering
specific areas of social relations. Charles Mcllwain, commenting
on feudal societies, says, " Theoretically there was never a period
when rights were more insisted upon." 36 Feudal ideology revolved around the concept of the "fief," that is, an object or a
claim which by definition moved from person to person and yet
bound persons in specific relations. " Everything of value was
brought under the conception of the fief, one's land, one's personal
status, one's office." 87 The lord and prospective vassal would
enter into an agreement concerning a fief wherein the lord maintained a claim on the fief while granting the vassal a conditional interest hinging on the fulfillment of stipulated obligations.
Though feudalism has been characterized as a social system based
on a strong sense of loyalty among vassals to a lord, it is perhaps
better understood as a social system founded on contracted relations. The fief contract dictated a relationship between a lord
and a vassal governed by mutually recognized rights and duties
that were protected through a court system to which both parties
had recourse. 88
A contemporary critique of the use, meaning and justification
of rights in medieval theory and practice would suggest two significant qualitative limitations. First, neither the rights of which
86 Charles H. Mc!lwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West:
From the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1932), 182.
87 Ibid., 181.
38 Ibid., 180-182, 190. See also, R. W. Carlyle and A. J. Carlyle, A History
of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, volume 3, Political Theory From
the Tenth Century to the Thirteenth (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc.,
1928)' 19-74, 179-185.

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Thomas speaks nor the rights recognized in feudal society are
"human rights." Such rights do not fit Alan Gewirth's description of human rights as " rights all persons equally have, simply
because they are human." 39 Second, in both cases, rights are
paradigmatically presented as claims which guarantee some benefit for the claimant, rather than in terms of liberties possessed by
persons. The remainder of this section will address these two
issues.
( 1) Justice Deals Unequally With Unequal Persons
The personal right claims Thomas recognizes are for him
" natural " rights and thus " moral " rights in that they are
grounded on the universally knowable and binding natural law
as evident in the ordering of society. Contemporary discussions
of rights language also use the terms " moral " and " natural " as
well as a third, " human," to describe rights. Precise differentiation between the three terms is difficult, as many commentators
tend to use all of them, or at least two of them, interchangeably.
"Human rights," as Gewirth argues above, refers to legitimate
claims persons have on account of some understanding of what it
means to be human. For example, human rights are warranted on
such grounds as human reason, human dignity and human agency.
The concept " natural rights " originated in theorizing about
the claims persons could make in the "state of nature" by "law
of nature." John Locke, the paradigmatic voice of the liberal
rights theories, understood rights to be "natural" in this sense.40
Ronald Dworkin, a contemporary liberal rights theorist, rejects
the Lockean notion that " natural rights are supposed to be spectral attributes worn by primitive men like amulets." Dworkin's
so Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1.
4o See John Locke, "The Second Treatise of Civil Government: An Essay
Concerning the True Origin, Extent, and End of Civil Government," in Two
Treatises of Government, introduction and notes by Peter Lasslet (New York:
New American Library, 1965). Locke's meaning of natural rights is illustrated
by his other descriptions of rights. For example, he refers to : " native right,"
442; "natural common right," 341; "original right," 397; and "natural right,"
307.

RIGHTS

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understanding of " natural " denotes that such rights " are not the
product of any legislation, or convention, or hypothetical contract." 41 Modern Catholic social thought uses "human rights"
and " natural rights " as synonyms in that the former are said
to rest on something " natural " in the person. This distinction
between natural rights and other rights can be used across the
board to distinguish human rights, natural rights, and moral
rights from positive or legal rights. As Joel Feinberg states,
A man has a legal right when the official rncognition of his claim (as
valid) is called for by the governing rules. This definition, of course,
hardly applies to moral rights, but that is not because the genus of
which moral rights are a species is something other than claims. A
man has a moral right when he has a claim, the recognition of which
is called for-not (necessarily) by legal rules-but by moral principles, or the principles of an enlightened conscience.42
Human rights and natural rights are, therefore, "moral"
rights because the justification of such rights is grounded on a
conception of the moral, that is, a moral principle or an objective
morality. Moral rights are normative claims which are to order
some areas of human relations. Positive rights, or rights granted
by society, are to reflect and to guarantee moral rights. A final
point can be made here. A " positivist " is one who, while recognizing the validity of rights granted by society, denies the existence of human, natural or moral rights. As Jeremy Bentham so
descriptively claimed, positivists hold that such rights are nothing but " nonsense on stilts." 43
Thomas's personal rights are not moral in Gewirth's sense, nor
are they natural in Locke's sense. Thomas does not begin with
a Lockean conception of the " state of nature " nor does he have
a theory of human rights as understood by moderns. The reason
for this is Thomas's world view lacked a notion of universal
41 Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1978), 176.
42 Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
Inc., 1973), 67.
43 Quoted in Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, 184.

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egalitarianism. He thus could not agree with Gewirth's description of human rights as " rights all persons equally have, simply
because they are human." Different people, defined especially in
terms of their place/position/role in society, have different claims.
Thomas's discussion of justice illustrates this. Justice, writes
Thomas, " is distinguished according to various offices, hence .. .
we speak of ' military,' or ' magisterial,' or 'priestly ' right .. .
for the reason that something proper is due to each class of persons in respect of his particular office." 44 Thus the land owner,
parent, slave owner, spouse, judge, prince, priest, even the poor
have a "place" in society and specific claims therein. 45 Justice
then deals " unequally with unequal " persons. 46
( 2) The Primacy of Duty
For Thomas, the objective right necessarily and substantially
directs right claims in ways foreign to modern political thought.
This is because for Thomas the imperatives entailed in " that
which is right" are primarily described in terms of duties rather
than rights. Thomas is more concerned with what persons ought
to do than with what persons can claim. The moral life is then
the life of obligation, to God, to others and to oneself. 47
Thomas's use of rights language as referring to personal moral
claims is secondary to his concern for describing conditions of
moral obligation. His use of personal rights is then " passive"
in that the fulfillment of these claims is dependent on the actions of
others. Passive rights, according to Richard Tuck, are rights "to
be given or allowed something by someone else" rather than
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Za, Zae, q. 57, art. 4.
is noted that the Magna Carta, signed by King James of England in
1215, guaranteed the rights of English barons against the crown.
46 Gilby, The Political Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 222.
47 Thomas's discussion of law is focused on obligations.
For example, he
describes a law as being just in terms of its relation to the common good, not
in terms of protecting individuals' rights. See Summa Theologica, 2a, 2ae,
q. 90, art. 3, 4, and q. 96, art. 4. In his discussion of the Old Law, 2a, 2ae, q.
100, art. 5, Thomas states that we have obligations of " fidelity, reverence, and
service " to God, and we are obligated not to harm our neighbor in " thought,
word, or deed."
44

45 It

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rights "to do something oneself." 48 They are rights to specific
benefits rather than rights to act.49 The latter conception of
rights, or "active rights," is not dependent for its fulfillment on
the duty of others so much as it is on the agent's ability to act
and to choose, that is, on the agent's liberty. Active rights attribute to persons " a kind of ' sovereignty ' over their moral
world." 50 The Thomistic primacy of duty, along with the lack
of a principle of universal egalitarianism, categorically separates
Thomas's understanding of rights from modern human rights
theories.
These two characteristics are not unrelated. Rights based on
social position are " rights in personam" in that they are related
to the positive duties of specified persons. Such duties necessarily
benefit the claimant. This conception of rights contrasts " rights
in rem," that is, rights related to the general duties of all persons
to refrain from harming others. 51 Rights of liberty that so characterize modern rights theories are rights in rem.
In the contemporary use of the term, then, it is a misnomer to
speak of a " rights theory" in Thomas Aquinas. For as Tuck
suggests, if rights are understood in terms of the positive duties
of others, " the language of rights is irrelevant, and to talk of
' human rights ' is simply to raise the question of what kinds of
duty we are under to other human beings, rather than to provide
48 Tuck, Natural Rights

Theories, 6.
possible benefits to be claimed by passive rights are many. John
Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980),
204, for example writes, " there is the advantage of being the recipient of
other persons' acts or service or forbearances ; the advantage of being legally
or morally free to act; the advantage of being able to change one's own or
others' legal position, and of being immune from such change (when of a
form characteristically disadvantageous to anyone subject to the change) at
the hands of others ; the advantage of being able to secure any or all of the
foregoing advantages by action at law, or at least compensation for wrongful
denial of any of them."
50 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 6.
51 See P. J. Fitzgerald, Salmond on Jurisprudence (London:
Sweet and
Waxwell, 1966), especially 217, and 234-235. See also Feinberg, Social Philosophy, 59-60.
49 The

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us with any independent moral insights." 52 To conclude,
Thomas's use of personal rights can be described as characteristically passive and set within specific social arrangements.
With broad but distinct strokes, the next section will consider
the use of rights language within the Catholic tradition from the
medieval period after Thomas through the Renaissance. Though
the figures of this period are never cited in contemporary Catholic
discussions of rights (many of the narratives refer simply to a
" Thomistic Legacy" preceding Rerum novarum), it will be
shown that lively and significant debates touching on such critical
issues as private property, personal liberty and " human " rights
occurred within the Catholic tradition after Thomas and before
the papacy of Leo XIII.

The Apostolic Poverty Controversy
It is Tuck's thesis that the beginnings of the first true natural
rights theory, that is, a theory of active rights justified on claims
an individual can make in the state of nature, can be found in the
intense ecclesiastical debate concerning apostolic poverty. 53 This
intriguing debate, 54 which began in the late thirteenth century and
lasted into the middle of the fourteenth century, engaged three
prominent groups (not to mention the Holy Roman Emperor and
an anti-pope) who sought to define normatively how religious
persons ought to live " apostolically " (that is, as the apostles of
Jesus lived) in the world. The three groups were: 1) the Franciscans, under the leadership of Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and
William of Ockham; 2) the Dominicans, particularly Meister
Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 1.
Tierney, " Religion and Rights : A Medieval Perspective," l ournal
of Law and Religion 5 (1987) : 166, challenges this position as he argues that
the figures of this debate relied on "the matrix of the twelfth century juridicial
humanism."
64 For a more thorough discussion see Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later
Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent c. 1250-1450, 2 vols.
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 1: 51-255; and Frederick
Copleston, A History of Philosophy, volume 3, Ockham to Suarez (Westrninister, MD: The Newman Press, 1953), 111-116.
52

53 Brian

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Eckhart, who relied on the work of Thomas Aquinas; and, 3)
the papacy, particularly Pope Nicholas III and Pope John XXIL
Nicholas, a former protector of the Franciscan order, issued the
bull E:i:iit in 1279 justifying the Franciscan ideal of apostolic
poverty. The pope declared that consumption of a commodity, as
distinct from trading or possessing a commodity, "did not count
as the exercise of a property right." " 5 The Franciscans thus had
an ecclesiastical warrant for their interpretation of what the
apostolic life demanded. Though the order used and held temporal goods, it did so without "possessing" them. In 1329, Pope
John XXII, the pope who canonized Thomas Aquinas, issued
the bull Quia vit reprobus censuring the doctrine of apostolic
poverty as heretical. Gorden Leff narrates :
John finally struck at the root of Franciscan poverty by refusing to
separate use in fact from the right of use ; consumption also meant
dominion; the usufruct of anything consumed went with the right to
consume it: ownership must be with him who exercised the right.
What in effect John had done was to reject the non-legal, purely
natural status of simple usus facti, and with it the distinction between use by necessity and use by right: use of anything, whatever
the purpose, carried the right to exercise it. 56
Tuck, quoting Silvertro Mazzolini da Prierio, a sixteenth
century Dominican theologian, distills the controversy to a debate concerning the relation between the concepts " dominium,"
or property, and " ius," or right. In contemporary terminology,
the debate centered on whether rights are best understood as
paradigmatically active or passive. Passive rights, as illustrated
above, recognize claims based on one's dominium, that is, on one's
property. On the other hand, a theory of active rights not only
justifies iura grounded on dominium but characteristically maintains that the very meaning of the term " right " implies dominium. As H. L. A. Hart states, " Rights are typically conceived
of as possessed or owned by or belonging to individuals, and these
expressions reflect the conception of moral rules . . . as forming
55 Tuck,

Natural Ri:ghts Theories, 20-21.
in the Later Middle Ages, 165.

5 6 Leff, Heresy

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a kind of moral property of individuals to which they are as individuals entitled." 57 To have a right means that a person has
dominium or sovereignty, in Tuck's words, "over one's relevant
moral world." 58 Since passive rights "rely exclusively for their
operation on their recognition by other people," 59 to have a right
in the passive sense does not necessarily imply having domin'ium
so much as it implies the existence of a network of moral obligations. Recall Thomas' s discussion of property. Thomas grounds
the right to own property on a moral vision of a rightly ordered
society. The common good justifies and even limits the control
persons have over temporal goods. This same moral vision demands that complementing the right to own property is the reciprocal duty of stewardship. The use, meaning and justification
of passive rights are bound within a network of moral obligations.
As Thomas's discussion of property illustrates, passive rights
must be understood in relation to the duties of others as well as to
the duties of the right-holder. Rights understood in a passive
sense check the notion of individual sovereignty with a vision of
a substantive moral order. In the apostolic poverty controversy,
William of Ockham represents this latter position of passive
rights and Jean Gerson represents the former position advocating
rights in the active sense.
William of Ockham wrote 0 pus nonagino Dierum, described
by Tuck as " virtually the last shot from the Franciscan side in
the campaign," 60 to refute Pope John XXII's Quia vir reprobus.
The fourteenth century Franciscan held that all persons have a
natural, God-given right to private property anterior to human
convention. This right, as Ockham describes it, is clearly connected to and indeed dependent on the duty of self-preservation.
Persons have been given the right to own property sq as to guarantee their survival. Moreover, persons cannot renounce the
57 H. L. A. Hart, "Are There Any Natural Rights?" in Rights, ed. David
Lyons (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1979), 19 (his emphasis).
5 8 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 3.
59 Ibid., 5.
eo Ibid., ZS.

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right, nor can it be taken away from them, in that such a renunciation or theft would be a serious threat to their well-being. It
might be said that for Ockham the right to own property was in
a sense "inalienable." However, says Ockham, the Franciscan
vow of poverty was justified in that this specific renunciation of
the right to own property, to have dominium over " possessions,"
did not conflict with the fundamental duty of self-preservation on
the grounds that the well-being of the friars was not threatened. 61
Though the exception to the inalienable-like principle certainly
weakens his argument, it is noted that Ockham's justification for
the right to own property is characteristically passive. Again, the
right is not expressed as an independent moral claim but as an
element of a network of moral claims. In this case, the right is
based on the prior duty of self-preservation.
Tuck suggests that the first natural rights theory evolved from
the anti-poverty position found in the writing of the early fifteenth century mystic Jean Gerson. Quoting Gerson :
There is a natural dominium as a gift from God, by which every creature has a ius directly from God to take inferior things into its own
use for its own preservation. Each has this ius as a result of a fair
and irrevocable justice, maintained in its original purity, or a natural
integrity. In this way Adam had dominium over the fowls of the air
and the fish in the sea ... To this dominium the dominium of liberty
can also be assimilated, which is an unrestrained facultas given by
God.62
Note especially Gerson' s linking of liberty and dominium.
Liberty is a ius, a facultas one has sovereignty over. This is a
distinctive move. When liberty is classified as a right, a possession much like property, the focus of rights language shifts. An
expansion of the very meaning of rights occurs. Liberty rights
are active rights, that is, they are rights to do things. Gerson's
identification of liberty as a right pushes rights language one step
61 Ibid., 22-24. See also Philotheus
Boehner, " Ockham's Political Ideas,"
in Collected Articles on Ockham, ed. Eligious M. Buytaert (St. Bonaventure,
NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1958).
62 Jean Gerson, De Vita Spirituali Animae, quoted in Tuck, Natural Rights
Theories, 27.

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out of Thomas's natural law understanding of rights on a formal
as well as a material level. Liberty rights move beyond the network of moral norms because rights to do things are not necessarily related to positive duties in others. Wesley Hohfeld describes the concept of a liberty right as a " privilege " denoting
not only the absence of a positive duty on behalf of others, but
also that others have "no-right" correlative to an agent's liberty
right. 63 A second and decisive step out of the natural law vision
of rights language, which Gerson approaches, divorces rights
language from a substantive moral vision. Again looking to
Hohfeld, a liberty right denotes not only an absence of duties and
rights of others but an absence of duty on behalf of the claimant
as well. Liberty rights, active rights, are paradigmatically subjective in that the ground of such rights is the sovereignty of the
individual rather than the moral law.
As a fundamental issue in the apostolic poverty controversy
was theological, the understanding of God and God's relation to
the world was critical. With the advent of the Renaissance and
Reformation, these fundamental presuppositions of medieval
theology were shaken. The significance of Gerson' s development
was lost in the sixteenth century and was not to be restated until
into the seventeenth century. By the end of the fifteenth century,
however, Gerson's followers
. . . had converted the claim-rights theory of the twelfth century
completely into an active right theory, in which to have any kind of
right was to be a dominus, to have sovereignty over that bit of one's
world-such that even a child had sovereignty over its parents when
it came to questions of its welfare.64
Just as it is difficult to wrestle with the varied meanings of
the word " right" or the expression "to have a right," so it is
with liberty. Nonetheless, the use, meaning, and justification of
€13 See Wesley N. Hohfe!d, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in
Judicial Reasoning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964, reprinted
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 35-50. This volume, first published
in 1919, is a classic jurisprudential analysis of rights language.
e4 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 28.

RIGHTS

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liberty, as well as of property, have a significant place in the history of rights language. In pre-modern Catholic social thought,
Gerson's correlation of liberty and dominium is perhaps more of
an exception than the norm, but it does represent an attempt to
resolve what has become a tension in the Catholic tradition, that
is, reconciling individual liberty with the objective moral order.

Rights and the Origins of Internation'al Law
If the historical significance of Gerson and the use of rights
language within the apostolic poverty controversy was in its
originality, the significance of the use of rights language in the
sixteenth century retrieval of Thomas Aquinas lies in its effect
on the development of international law. This next section will
consider rights language in the thought of Francisco de Vitoria,
the Dominican known as " the founder of modern international
law," 65 and Francisco Suarez, the renowned Jesuit philosopher
of law.
The travels of Columbus, the discovery of the New World, and
the Spanish conquest of "undiscovered " lands, created, in the
words of A. T. Serra, "a true spatial revolution which rendered
insufficient the medieval concept of Christendom." 66 The commonly held borders of morality were destroyed as the Conquistadores, defending their Christian faith and expanding the strength
of their Spanish homeland, brutally attacked the Native American
"barbarians." The violence associated with the Spanish conquest
attracted the attention of many in Spain including Francisco de
Vitoria. The prominent Dominican defended the Indians and
their rights to property and self-governance on what might be
called a " human rights " argument. All persons, argued Vitoria,
whether barbarian, heretic or Christian, have a common rational
65 Felix Alluntis, "Francisco
de Vitoria," in Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(New York: Macmillan Publishing Company Inc. & The Free Press, 1967).
See also James B. Scott, The Catholic Conception of International Law
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1934), vii.
66 Antonio Truyol Serra, The Principles of Political and International Law
in the Wark of Francisco De Vitoria (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispanica,
1946), 17.

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faculty, a universal human characteristic, based on the "
sion of the image of God." 67 This faculty enables humans to have
dominium over their actions and thus dominium over temporal
goods. Just as it is wrong for the Spanish to unjustly attack, steal
from or enslave non-Catholic Europeans, so too, says Vitoria, it
is wrong to bring such harm on the Indians. Quoting Vitoria:
Our proposition is also confirmed by the authority of St. Thomas
Aquinas (Prima Secundae, qu. 1 art. 1 and 2, and Contra Gentiles,
bk. 3, c. 110), to the effect that only rational creatures have dominion
over their acts, the test of a man's being master of his acts being (as
St. Thomas says, Prima Pars, qu. 82, art. 1, on obj. 3) that he has
the power of choice.68
Since the Indians have use of reason, illustrated in their orderly social system-marriage, governing authorities, a system of
exchange, "a kind of religion," 69 as well as by the fact that "they
make no error in matters which are self-evident to others," 10
they have dominium over their actions and thus over temporal
goods. Natural reason then dictates that the Indians are entitled
to the same treatment as the Europeans.
The " spatial revolution " and its subsequent problems of international travel and conquest widened Vitoria's assumptions
about the social order. Indeed his significant contribution to
modem thought was his understanding of a global positive law
that was to govern and order relations between states much as
civil law governed persons within a state. He wrote:
And, indeed, there are many things in this connection which issue
from the law of nations, which, because it has sufficient derivation
from natural law, is clearly capable of conferring rights and creating
obligations. And even if we grant that it is not always derived from
natural law, yet there exists clearly enough a consensus of the greater
part of the whole world, especially in behalf of the common good
of alL 11
6 7 Francisco de Vitoria, De Indis et lure Belli Refl,ectiones, ed. Ernest Nys,
trans. John P. Bate, The Classics of International Law, ed. James Scott (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917), 127.
as Ibid., 126.
10 Ibid.
69 Ibid., 127.
r 1 Ibid., 153.

RIGHTS IN PRE-MODERN

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The totus orbis, described by A. T. Serra as " the world as a
whole, as a moral unity of peoples politically organized under
natural law," 72 was Vitoria's vision. The ius gentium, the law
of nations, was to reflect and embody this global common good.
Vitoria expanded the frame of reference in which right claims
could be made, but he by no means removed such claims from the
objective demands of justice and equality. Vitoria's use of rights,
like Thomas's, never leaves the service of that which is right.
Rights are warranted, according to Vitoria, by the human dominium, or faculty to choose; yet this dominium is limited. It is to
choose the means to attain the natural end of persons. The telos
is given, and persons are to act appropriately. Thus rights are
grounded on and limited by the objective moral order. If
Vitoria's" human rights" argument recognizes rights as personal
powers possessed, it does so to promote and to protect justice
and equality beyond traditional national borders.
Gerson's use of active rights can be described as more an exception than the rule in Catholic social thought, while Vitoria's use
of rights, at least on a formal level, might be described as characteristically Catholic. Two examples from Vitoria's discussion
of the just war illustrate this point. At times, says Vitoria, " the
justice of the war is doubtful, that is, when there are apparent
and probable reasons on both sides." 73 In a case such as this,
both "princes are asserting a right." 74 Though this latter statement suggests the princes are asserting powers they possess, it is
more accurate to say the princes are asserting substantive claims
of justice. The objective sense of right, here a normative justice
claim, directs the understanding of rights. This relation between
that which is right and rights guides Vitoria's work.
A second illustration of Vitoria's concern for the objective
moral order is found in his discussion of what contemporary
12 Serra, The Principles of Political and International Law in the Work of
Francisco de Vitoria, 18.
73 Vitoria, De Indis et lure Belli Refiectiones, 174.
H Ibid., 175.

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persons would call the "right to conscientious objection." Vitoria
states Christians are bound to evaluate the justice of particular
wars. This means Christians must examine whether or not a
just cause exists. If there is no just cause (" There is a single
and only just cause for commencing a war, namely a wrong received." 75 ), the killing of the enemy is unjustified, that is, it is
murder. Quoting Vitoria:
But in the case before us the enemy is innocent. Therefore they may
not be killed. Again, a prince sins when he commences a war in
such a case ... Therefore soldiers are not excused when they fight
in bad faith ... Hence flows the corollary that subjects whose conscience is against the justice of a war may not engage in it whether
they be right or wrong. This is clear, for ' whatever is not of faith
is sin' (Romans, ch. 14). 76

The "right" (not Vitoria's word) to conscientiously object to
participation in a war stems from the dominium that is characteristic of human nature. Persons must choose the relevant means
to attain that which is right. The agent's decision not to participate in a war is a judgment warranted by the agent's primordial duty to do good and avoid evil. For Vitoria, and indeed for
pre-modern Catholic thought in general, the individual power
possessed stands in reference to that which is objectively right.
Rights language here is paradigmatically passive. It would be incorrect to say that Vitoria advocated " liberty " of conscience.
One has the duty to follow one's conscience.
Vitoria's use of rights contrasts with the Gersonian sense of ius.
The active rights theory of Gerson identified rights with dominium over the self. A right from this perspective is understood to
be one's property and thus could be traded or exchanged as any
other property. According to Gerson, one could even exchange
one's liberty to the point of selling oneself into slavery. For
Vitoria, rights and liberty were under the dominium of the objective moral order. Thus he asserts, " liberty cannot rightfully
1° Ibid., 170.
rn Ibid., 173.

RIGHTS

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be traded for all the gold in the world." 77 Tuck accurately suggests that the contrast between Vitoria and Gerson on this point
illustrates " perhaps the recurrent theme in the history of rights
theories," that is, "a theory of rights [active rights] permitted
practices which an anti-subjectivist theory [passive rights] prohibited." 78 For Gerson, the right to sell oneself into slavery was
the logical extension of equating liberty and dominium.
Vitoria expanded Thomas's understanding of ius in two ways.
First he broadened the objective vision of "that which is right"
beyond " the communal setting" to the totus orbis. In doing so
he defended a set of in rem rights, that is general rights all persons have against others. This type of rights is distinct from
Thomas's in personam rights which by definition correspond to
specific duties of determinate persons. Second, his vision of the
objective order allowed him to extend the justification of rights
beyond those warranted in relation to specific social positions to
a more universal concept of rights based on the fact that all persons were created in the image of God. Vitoria espoused a vision
of "human rights." A generation after Vitoria's death, another
Spanish Thomistic theologian, Francisco Suarez, combined elements of a Gersonian understanding of liberty with Thomistic
social philosophy.
Suarez's concern, unlike that of his predecessor, was not focused on resolving concrete problems. Suarez was a philosopher
of law who worked with the principles, justification, and categorization of law rather than with its practical application. 79 It is thus
fitting that Suarez's most remembered contribution to the rights
discussion is his analysis of ius :
[J]ustice is said to be the virtue that renders to every man his own
right (ius suum), that is to say, the virtue that renders to every
man that which belongs to him. Accordingly, this right to claim
(actio), or moral power, which every man possesses with respect to
11

Vitoria, quoted in Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 49.

1s Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 49 (his emphasis).
7 0 For a discussion of the relation between Vitoria and Suarez, see Scott,
The Catholic Conception of International Law, 127-131.

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his own property or with respect to a thing which in some way pertains to him, is called, ius, and appears to be the true object of
justice.80
Though the statement "ius ... appears to be the true object
of justice" is a recital of a characteristically Thomistic theme, 81
John Finnis describes Suarez's definition of ius as crossing a
" watershed " in comparison to Thomas. Finnis says :
The meaning which for Aquinas was primary is rather vaguely
mentioned by Suarez and then drops out of sight; conversely, the
meaning which for Suarez is primary does not appear in Aquinas'
discussion at all . . . [J] us [for Suarez] is essentially something
someone has, and above all (or at least paradigmatically) a power or
liberty. If you like, it is Aquinas' primary meaning of ' jus ', but
transformed by relating it exclusively to the beneficiary of the just
relationship, above all to his doings and havings.82
Evidence of this crossing of a " watershed " can be found in
Suarez's Gersonian-like understanding of liberty. As Suarez discusses the " natural law of dominion " 83 he quite easily moves,
indicating no categorical difference, from the issue of private
ownership of property to personal liberty. " Man," he says, "is
lord of his own liberty, it is possible for him to sell or alienate
the same." 84 Liberty is in fact "a lawful right ... positively
granted by nature " 85 which persons can voluntarily forfeit or
which can be legitimately taken away by a higher authority "by
way of punishment." 86 Voluntary slavery, even of whole peoples,
is justified by nature according to Suarez. 87
80 Francisco Suarez, De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore, in Selections From
Three Works of Francisco Suarez, 2 vols., trans. Gwladys L. Williams, Ammi
Brown and John Waldron with certain revisions by Henry Davis, The Classics
of Internatiunal Law, ed. James Brown Scott (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1944)' 2 :31.
8 1 See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2a, 2ae, q. 57, art. 1.
s 2 Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 207 (his emphasis). Earlier in
the text, 45, Finnis argues Suarez had other significant differences with Thomas.
8 3 Suarez, De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore, 278.
84 Ibid., 279.
85 Ibid., 280.
86 Ibid., 279.
81 Ibid., 381.

RIGHTS IN PRE-MODERN

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Finnis describes Suarez as being on same side of the " watershed " as Thomas Hobbes in distinction to Thomas. This would
mean Suarez's position could logically be pushed to Hobbes's
position. Yet for Hobbes the subjective ius is independent of lex
and is indeed independent of any objective context concerning
"that which is right." In Leviathan, Hobbes states:
RIGHT, consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbeare; Whereas LAW,
determineth, and bindeth to one of t'hem: so that Law and Right,
differ as much as Obligation, and Liberty; which in one and the same
matter are inconsistent.
And because the condition of Man is a condition of W arre of every
one against every one; in which case every one is governed by his
own Reason; and there is nothing he_ ican make use of, that may not
be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It
followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a Right to every
thing, even to one anothers body.ss
Hobbes states that the authority for law lies in the command of
the sovereign. The reason, however, why persons obey the law
is to insure they get what they want, dominion, and avoid what
they do not want, death.so Thus it is a law of nature, says Hobbes,
that in order to protect ourselves, we are to " lay down this right
to all things." 00
Finnis, then, seems to overstate the distinction between Thomas
and Suarez and the similarity between Suarez and Hobbes. 91 Two
points stand out in Finnis's discussion. First, as was stated
above, Thomas's understanding of ius ought not to be described
as exclusively objective. Thomas did recognize a personal meaning of ius, though such a use is not evident in his discussion " On
Right "-Finnis's only reference to Thomas on ius. Second,
Suarez's understanding of ius might not be easily pushed into the
ss Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin
Books, 1968), 189-190.
so See Alasdair Macintyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1966), 134.
9o Hobbes, Leviathan, 190.
91 See Ernest Fortin, "The New Rights Theory and the Natural Law,"
The Review of Politics 44 (1982) : 590-612.

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radical Hobbesian position which divorces ius from a substantive
moral order. At least on a formal level, ius is the object of justice
for Suarez as it is for Thomas. Suarez does use ius to protect
" the beneficiary of the just relationship " (so too in a sense does
Thomas) ; however, such use cannot necessarily be described as
a liberty. For example when Suarez writes, " For it is thus that
the owner of a thing is said to have a right ( ius) in that thing,
and the labourer is said to have that right to his wages by reason
of which he declared worthy of hire," 2 he is defending "that
which is right." The right of dominium, whether of property or
liberty, must reflect the natural law. The distinction, says Suarez,
between the natural law and law concerning dominium is,
1)

. . . the former kind comprehends rules and principles for right
conduct which involve necessary truth, and are therefore immutable,
since they are based upon the intrinsic rectitude or perversity of
their objects; whereas the law concerning dominion is merely the
subject-matter of the other preceptive law, and consists (so to speak)
of a certain fact, that is, a certain condition of habitual relation of
things.93
The purpose of this essay is to trace the roots of the use of
rights language in contemporary Catholic social thought. It has
been shown that the pre-modern tradition uses rights as " personal " claims rather than as " human rights " claims. From
Thomas Aquinas to Francisco Suarez, rights language in Catholic
thought most often follows the paradigm: The object of justice is
right, and rights specify certain conditions of justice based on
one's "holdings." That is, with the exception of Gerson and his
followers, rights language in this tradition is characteristically
passive. The rights recognized as valid claims are warranted and
at the same time limited by the moral order. This is not to suggest that a consistent material vision of the moral order existed
from Thomas to Suarez. Note for example the varied justification for specific claims, one's temporal holdings, one's position in
society, and, according to Vitoria, one's innate humanness. A
92

Suarez, De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore, 30.

oa Ibid., 279-280.

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121

consistent thread of the tradition is an understanding that that
which is right and right claims are intimately related. Right
claims rest on an objective authority. Rights are not independent
moral claims simply to do things. The natural law for Thomas
justifies specific subjective claims based on one's social position.
One's "property," understood in terms of land holdings or office,
determines one's rights. With the apostolic poverty controversy,
the notion of " property " was expanded so Gerson could refer to
one's right as property. Indeed, even liberty became dominium.
Vitoria, recalling Thomas, expands the Thomistic vision of rights
from the " communal setting " to the international arena. Suarez
attempts to bridge a liberty right within Thomistic natural law.
It is suggested that Vitoria stands out as a paradigmatic figure
for Catholic social thought. 94 His unfolding of the use, meaning
and justification of rights to international relations, along with
his recognition that the Native American " barbarians " were indeed human beings created in the image of God, are two significant developments. Vitoria pioneered what has become an organizing theme in contemporary Catholic social thought, that is,
he used rights language, specifically human rights, to defend the
powerless in the face of injustice caused by the powerful. Moved
by the realization that the conquest ideology of his Spanish homeland was not " right," that is, the natural duties of the Spanish as
travelers and traders (not to mention Christians) were ignored,
Vitoria proclaimed a fundamental human equality protecting the
lives and livelihood of the powerless and exploited Native
Americans.

94 For a contemporary critique of Vitoria's work from the perspective of a
liberation theologian, see Gustavo Gutierrez, " The Violence of a System,"
in Christian Ethics and Economics: The North-South Conflict, eds. Dietmar
Mieth and Jacques Pohier, Concilium, volume 140 (New York: Seabury Press,
1980).

AN ITALIAN VIEW OF THE DEBATE
ON VIRTUE
TERENCE

KENNEDY,

C.Ss.R.

Accademia Alfonsiana
Rome, Italy

F

ATHER GIUSEPPE ABBA, S.B.D., professor of moral
philosophy at the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome,
has written two volumes of prime importance for the theory
of the moral virtues. Although writing in Italian, he has entered
into the thick of debate in other languages, especially English.
The first, Lex et Virtus: Studi sull'evoluzione delta dottrina
morale di san Tommaso d'Aquino (Las-Roma, 1983, 293 pp.)
is every bit as wide ranging as its title suggests. His thesis is
that St. Thomas's moral thought underwent a long and radical
evolution that issued in "a new science" in the Secunda Pars of
the Summa Theologiae totally centered in the virtues. His book
is neatly divided in two parts: humanity under the regime of law
and humanity under the regime of virtue. He argues that the
Scriptum super Sententiis presents virtue as the capacity to put
law into practice in life. Here law has priority because it is conceived as participation in the divine rectitude, and virtue is derivative in as far as it facilitates compliance with God's law, making
our response easy, pleasurable and spontaneous by restraining the
disorderly influence of passion on our moral response. The De
V eritate, he maintains, follows the same descending schema.
Truth is communicated downwards through the hierarchy of intellectual beings so that the human virtues are seen mainly in
terms of how they reflect the divine truth, especially in the moral
knowledge involved in free choice or liberum arbitrium. The
Summa Contra Gentiles III classifies morality under the rubric
of the law as rational submission to divine government through
123

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c.ss.R.

Providence. In this vision, our return to God as final end is given
focal emphasis before being considered the fruit of our effort.
Abba makes a strong case that in the Secunda Pars St. Thomas
passes from a conception of morality based in law to one founded
in the virtues. Morality assumes deeper significance in its own
right because the human person is no longer viewed mainly as a
direct reflection of divine truth but truly as imago Dei having
dominion over his acts in freedom and deliberation. God, the
subjectum of theology, is known through his effects in creation
and the motus hominis in Deum provides matter for the speculative discipline of theology as the study of God. Morality unveils
the mystery of God through how He works in our free activity
drawing us to Himself. St. Thomas thus has very little in common with those contemporary moralists who are wholly taken up
with the rightness of actions in normative ethics. Abba maintains that in the Summa St. Thomas was the first to afford morality its rightful place as an integral part in his theological synthesis. This involved a reworking of the idea of virtue beginning ,
with a fresh approach to habitus in the Ia !Jae. The determination of a habit ad unum is necessary because of the way a specifically human form is received in particular matter. This determination means not just a further specification of the matter,
but the coming into being of new abilities, a creative enablement .
of our nature with original energies so that it can reach its enc('
efficaciously. Virtue now has priority over law, because facility,
pleasure and spontaneity are only the effects of this new interior
transformation of our nature. Thus the originality of virtue arises
not from our mode of acting firmiter, faciliter, delectabiliter, but
from the new interior capacities by which we can realize our moral
selves, naturally and supernaturally. Law is thereafter thought of
in relation to its service of virtue as an external command
promulgated for the government of a collectivity. It is given precisely so as to educate the collectivity to virtue. In the community
governed by God's divine law it is not possible to follow His law
without being enlivened by the infused virtues. The eternal law is
not exhausted by our understanding of the precepts of divine law

THE DEBATE ON VIRTUE

125

but it embraces God's complete idea of human destiny in all its
aspects, i.e. as it regulates the theological and infused moral virtues through grace and the acquired virtues through reason. Now
the divine law can be participated in not only through external
instruction in the form of precepts, but more importantly as interior habitus. Abba proceeds to point out the importance of the
distinction between practical reason's grasp of universal moral
principles and the usus rationis in particulari eligibili. Prudence
here enters into our choices as the rational unifier of moral life
that conforms practical reason to right appetite. Charity of course
is the unifying principle of the moral life at the theological level,
where all good acts, however imperfectly, share in beatitude.
In this short essay it is not possible to describe Abba's analysis
of St. Thomas's various works and his account of their structure,
nor his discussion of Chenu, Guindon, Lafont, Kluxen, Merks and
Pesch and their contributions to understanding the II Pars in the
overall plan of the Summa. Reviewers have generally praised
Abba for his intuitions while being skeptical of an approach that
underplays the continuity and coherence of St. Thomas's intellectual thrust over his whole career.
Before his second book appeared he published an article that
should be quite enlightening for English speaking readers : " I
Christian Moral Principles di G. Grisez e la Secunda Pars della
Summa Theologiae", in Salesianum LXVIII (1986) 3, 637-680.
His analysis of the guiding principles in Grisez's synthetic thought
has probably not been surpassed ; these are the intelligible structure 1) of the human act, 2) of the redemptive action of the Word
Incarnate, and 3) of the action of the Christian united to Christ.
Grisez' s work has been planned on such vast dimensions that the
only intellectual corpus with which it warrants comparison is that
of St. Thomas. Abba begins by sketching the difference between
medieval and modern theology, i.e. the difference between faith
in rational dialogue with alternative philosophies of life, and
theology as a faith-based discipline radically separated from
autonomous reason after the Enlightenment model. Abba repeats the main ideas of Lex et V irtus, noting that " virtue " does

126

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not even appear among Grisez' s list of " Some Key Words " at
the back of his manual. Virtues, for Grisez, are the results of
choices that facilitate our prudential activities to integrate the
corporeal, intellectual and cultural dimensions into the existential,
" that is the capacity for free choices, the choices one makes and
whatever exists through choices " (quoted on Abba p. 669).
Abba concludes that Grisez has overlooked some of St. Thomas's
great insights; for example St. Thomas's insight that the virtues
can intervene even before the judgement of conscience, and that
they effectively make the knowledge expressed in that judgement
practical. In the Ila Pars the virtues are real perfections of the
existential dispositions that make good choices possible and are
thus the key to moral knowledge and not only its consequence.
Nevertheless Abba has remained profoundly influenced by
Grisez's teaching on such themes as integral human fulfillment,
the basic goods and the modes of responsibility.
Abba's second volume Felicita, vita buona e virtu: Saggio di
filosofia morale (Las-Roma, 1989, 298 pp) is a well crafted and
keenly reasoned confrontation between modern theories of virtue
and St. Thomas. Perhaps it is most remarkable for its capacity
to grasp the issues debated among Anglo-Saxon scholars and to
give a synthetic account of the fundamental positions with their
ramifications. Such an accurate overview and critical synthesis
of such a complicated field is indeed hard to come by. Abba
formulates a protracted argument demonstrating that virtue is
the necessary mediation for human happiness. The reduction of
moral philosophy to normative ethics, whether through Kant or
J. S. Mill, has led into a dead-end street with no answer to the
question " why be moral ? ". There has been a reconsideration of
the theme of happiness or felicity in some recent semantic studies
that have opened up new speculative possibilities on this topic.
For instance, W. Tatarkiewicz's Analysis of Happiness has inspired authors to think again of moral philosophy as a science of
practical reason. The human agent must be thought of as being
in an "original practical position" (p. 17) of relationship to the
wo:rld, God and neighbor in such a way that he seeks maximal

THE DEBATE

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127

happiness in the goods to be achieved as inherent in his actions.
As a philosopher, Abba favors an inclusive rather than a dominant conception of the last end (p. 28). Now it is precisely in
relation to such a comprehensive, non-reductive end that we can
justify moral duty and distinguish between good and bad conduct.
Happiness as last end is naturally and necessarily willed by humans in their free deliberate activities. Now practical reason first
becomes the rule of right living not by considering each act as dirrected to goods individually but in their unity as integrated to
human fulfillment. Practical reason assumes its governing function over human behavior not by conforming an act to an exterior
norm but by recognizing that the basic good intrinsic to an act is
an integral feature of happiness. Virtue is necessary to actuate a
good will toward the basic goods to be realized in right choices.
He holds that this Aristotelian schema underlies St. Thomas's
II Pars and that it has never really been applied in modern moral
theology. Contemplative, loving union with God and the subordination all other goods and ends to Him as our beatitude occurs
concretely only in the supernatural order. We only become worthy
of God and merit eternal life through the gift of grace. Because
of the nature of the divine eudoki' a in our regard, virtuous living is necessary for happiness, being an integral part of the divine plan and intention in creation (p. 69). Virtue renders the
human subject capable of loving God and neighbor so that happiness becomes a realizable, responsible human choice.
The recent debate between duty and virtue in ethics has called
into question the whole modern conception of ethics, as is evident
from Macintyre's After Virtue. Abbi reviewed the relevant
philosophical and theological literature beginning with Anscombe' s 1958 "Modern Moral Philosophy"; he analyzed the
critique of duty by Foot and Stocker, the objections to the concentration on right action by Iris Murdoch, Pincoffs, Becker and
most forcefully in Hauerwas's narrative theology of community.
However, none of these is able (in Aristotle's terms) " to save
the appearances " of our moral experience. While Macintyre appeals from duty to the telos of a community embodied in its social practices, he provides no justification for his conception of

128

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tradition. Abba did not have access to Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? where Macintyre expounds his theory of practical
reason more fully. Although Macintyre has been criticized for
not coming to grips with the pluralism in modern society, Abba
easily proves the superiority of St. Thomas's theory. Liberal society reduces virtue to the disposition to follow the rules of social co-existence and tolerance, i.e. to the imperatives of legal
justice. But justice deals with the external, objective world, so
that it follows that the first person point of view of the acting
subject has been lost from ethics. As Anscombe and many others
lament, modern ethics is bereft of a moral psychology. Modem
ethics are done in the third person by an observer, or homo faber.
It was Hobbes who turned our attention from agency to consequences. Casuistry in moral theology added the perspective of the
confessor as judge of the penitent. Liberty is defined as indifference or the capacity to escape being bound by the law. Acts are
judged exteriorly according to their conformity with God's commands. Abb;J. wants to restore St. Thomas's synthetic vision of
first person involvement to moral theory because it is the only
point of view from which the agent can be the author of his own
actions. Virtue considers actions not only singly but in the conduct of life as a whole. Conduct thus understood exemplifies the
formal idea of happiness and manifests the agent's good will. But
if we consider
the pure will we finish up with the Stoic idea
of the monadic of pure virtue. However the moral agent is by nature complex, so that the moral virtue resides in practical reason,
free will and the passions. This variety of virtues in a first person
ethic is generally not acknowledged by modern ethics. Aristotelian practical reason discerns the goods worthy of being pursued
and realized as an integral share and part of our happiness. Duty
and virtue are integrated by prudence through their mutual ordination to integral human fulfillment. The notion of virtue is
therefore maximal and inclusive because our choices bear upon
and realize human perfection ( p. 143).
Abba demonstrates how practices coordinate the exercise of
different powers so that by their cooperating together the good

THE DEBATE ON VIRTUE

129

of a whole life becomes a realizable goal. Therefore every intention bears on the integral human good and informs the appropriate practices composing our behavior. An action is the exterior component of a human act whose interior core is the choice
that realizes intention through deliberation and freedom (p. 155).
A means is not an exterior instrument; rather the end is immanent to its mediation, concretizing, exemplifying and realizing it
(p. 157). Virtue focuses on choice that terminates deliberation
with an act of free will that harmonizes with our passions and
desires. A virtue has stability due to its goal, the end on which
intention bears, while it is variable in the action performed and
in the choice made (p. 162).
Chapter V of Felicita, vita buona e virtu is most important.
Here Abba explains what constitutes the good life as eudaimonia, that is a combination of experiential operable goods
(which with substantial goods constitute a state of affairs) and
of existential operable goods (interior acts of will, practical reason and the passions) (diagram p. 171). It is obvious that Abbi
follows Grisez quite faithfully as regards the first principle of
morality but insists that the idea of integral human fulfillment
must be subordinated to the one ultimate end which for St.
Thomas can only be God. Abba corrects Grisez's formula so that
it is truly good to think, will and be moved by passion in a way
that is open to God's perfection, beatitude (p. 178). Virtue in its
maximal and inclusive sense is the ability to realize excellent
moral choices that realize the good life. Duty expresses an act's
interior demands and should not be confused with obligation
which arises from the imposition of an external law. Duty is
founded in bonum honestum so that practical reason commands
us to seek and pursue the basic goods not simply as fini proprii
of our natural inclinations, but as fini debiti ordered to the perfection of the good life. Now in view of this order both practical
reason and our rational and sensitive appetites are partly determined and partly indetermined. Reason is open to an infinite
variety of arguments and practical decisions. And the operative
faculties can cooperate in many ways among themselves. It is be-

130

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C.SS.R.

cause of this indetermination that we are able to adapt our activity to different situations. Now nature has a spontaneous
aptitude for virtue so that our specifically human traits flow from
rationality, which is formal in human nature, while our individual characteristics come from individual and bodily nature.
Reason reveals the beginnings of virtue in the first principles of
practical reason; the will and the passions show a tendency to follow reason as well as the individual promptings, skills and natural
that dispose to virtuous living. The virtues are not
natural, being either acquired or infused habitus generated either
by choice or by grace, that grow and can be corrupted. Reason
regulates the virtues actively by prudence and passively in the
will (justice) and in the passions (fortitude and temperance)
(p. 204).
Abba concludes with a discussion of prudence as practical wisdom, a virtue that guides the rest but depends on them to be
moved to ends genuinely human and fulfilling. Education hands
on the practical wisdom of how to live well from generation to
generation and opens up the mind of the seeker to the vision of
eternal happiness.

BOOK REVIEWS
The Inference That Makes Science. By ERNAN McMULLIN. The
Aquinas Lecture, 1992. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press,
1992. Pp. iv
112.

+

In this ambitious lecture Father Ernan McMullin recapitulates and
refines a thesis that has guided his thought for the past forty years. In
essence the thesis is this: precisely how science is made has eluded the
best minds for centuries, and only in the work of Charles Sanders
Peirce, suitably emended by McMullin, has the puzzle finally been
solved. " Retroduction " is the inference that makes science. Once this
is understood, errors on what constitutes scientific method-those of
Aristotle, Aquinas, Galileo, Newton, Bacon, Hume, et al.-can be rectified and one can see science for what it truly is: a complex process of
theory appraisal that yields, not definitive truth, but well-established
results to which assent can be given with at best "practical certainty,"
whatever that might be (pp. 91-96).
Why McMullin should have chosen such a theme for an Aquinas
Lecture is a question that defies reasonable answer. Surely one does
not have to he so negative about the thought of Aristotle, Aquinas, and
Galileo to advance one's ideas about science in the present day. What
McMullin could easily have done, and he hints at this in the last two
paragraphs of his lecture (pp. 97-98), is show how retroduction is itself simply a relaxed version of the demonstrative regress, the method
actually endorsed by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Galileo. Such a retroductive version, fair enough, yields knowledge of a probable cause, the
type of knowledge most typical of modern science. McMullin did not
have to embark on the dangerous course of trying to prove that proof
and certainty are forever beyond the grasp of science, or that never in
the history of science has anyone established a definitive truth. That,
in effect, is what McMullin has tried to do, and in the attempt to make
the point he fumbles at almost every juncture throughout a very long
lecture. To set the record straight more than a review is being re-·quested; perhaps a book, and even that might not suffice for those
whose minds are made up.
To understand the import of the lecture one must appreciate that it
is hut a brief episode in a debate over demonstration in science that
has been going on since McMullin first came to the University of Notre
Dame in 1954. I myself have published many hooks and articles that
engage the very point of his lecture and provide the contra evidence to

131

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BOOK REVIEWS

show elements of continuity in scientific method from Aristotle to the
present. My last two volumes, in press at the same time as McMullin's
Aquinas Lecture, answer in detail the aporiai he there raises. 1 I need
1 Galileo's Logic of Discovery and Proof. The Backgrnund, Content, and Use
of His Appropriated Treatises on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Boston Studies
in the Philosophy of Science 137. Dordrecht-Boston-London: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1992, xxiii
323 pp.; Galileo's Logical Treatises. A Translation,
with Notes and Commentary, of His Appropriated Questions on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 138. DordrechtBoston-London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992, xix
239 pp.

+

+

only refer the interested reader to them for an extended and documented reply to his arguments.
Some idea of the flavor of our debate, however, can be gained from
the following. To support his thesis, McMullin has to maintain that
Aristotle's proof that the moon is a sphere (from its having phases)
and that Galileo's proofs that there are mountains on the moon, that
Jupiter has satellites, and that Ven us circles the sun (all based on telescopic observations) are not strictly demonstrative, that is, they do not
yield true and certain conclusions. He declines to answer a query I
have often tendered whether he personally is certain on the basis of
pre-spacecraft evidence that the moon is a sphere, that there are mountains on it, that Jupiter has satellites, and so on. Instead he offers the
categorical response "that planetary science is not an apodictic science, indeed that no natural science is apodictic ... " because hidden
assumptions always underlie their "quasi-apodictic claims" (p. 107,
n. 88, emphasis his). Doublespeak aside, what that means is McMullin
has bought into the simplistic notion that " all facts are theory laden,"
that science itself is not episteme but opinion ( doxa) -highly confirmed
opinion, hut opinion nonetheless. Thus all of science is fallible and
revisable, including the most fundamental discoveries on which the
Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century was based. Now few
scientists, i.n my view, are prepared to accept McMullin's implied assessment that they are not really "knowers," only " retroducers," that question marks cloud their disciplines from day one, and that they must
ever be powerless to work their way out of the cloud.
With regard to the Aquinas Lecture Series, one can only ask cui
bono? To what end has this repudiation of Thomism been crafted? Is
it proposed as an up-to·date version of " problems for Thomists " ?
Hardly. There is an infinitude of ways to deny truth and certitude, and
little is distinctive here--most has been said before. As to what is
distinctive, McMullin's idiosyncratic blending of radical empiricism
with idealistic realism needs far more than 112 pages to convince.
WILLIAM

The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

A. wALL.ACE, O.P.

BOOK REVIEWS

133

The Foundations of Mysticism. Vol. I of The Pl'.esence of God: A
History of Western Christian Mysticism. By BERNARD McGINN.
New York: Crossroad, 1991. Pp. xxii and 49. Index and bibliography. $39.00 (cloth).
With this work Bernard McGinn delivers the first of a projected four
volume History of Western Christian Mysticism. The Foundations in·
cludes, as one might expect, the Scriptural tradition, Neoplatonic phi·
losophy, early Greek Fathers who influenced the Latins, as well as the
early "Founders" Ambrose and Augustine. Judged by the quality of
its start, this work promises to become a standard history for years to
come. The author displays a stunning acquaintance with the sources
of a subject that extends over full twenty centuries. Though " spe·cialized " in the spirituality of the high and late Middle Ages (he has
written substantial studies on Joachim de Fiore and Eckhart), the Chi·
cago professor has admirably succeeded in mastering the mass of per·
tinent literature of this early period, as the 150 pages of notes and
bibliography testify. His ideas are clearly presented, his evaluations of
others critical yet generous, his overall judgment impressively balanced.
Moreover, he ventures well beyond the usual territory. His work in-eludes subjects rarely discussed hut often alluded to in the history of
.early Christian spirituality: e.g. Gnosticism, which appears here not
as a " heresy ", but as a spiritual movement in its own right. The
thorough discussion of Philo together with the introductory chapter on
4 ' The Jewish
Matrix" (somewhat improperly entitled since it deals
only with the Hebrew Bible) display an unusual appreciation of the
underestimated influence of Jewish mysticism. One would have been
happy to read more about Marius Victorinus, hut is grateful to find
him present at all.
A historical survey of this scope may easily degenerate into an enumeration of titles and trends, whereby ideas are treated as facts. Professor McGinn has judiciously avoided that. Entire sections of his history are rich monographs about spiritual systems treated for their intrinsic interest rather than as transitory moments of an indifferent
history. The sections dealing with Origen, Evagrius, and Ambrose in
particular deserve to be read as independent treatises. The long concluding chapter on Augustine also presents a marvelous synthesis,
though one primarily written from the point of view of its later
impact.
In a study of this nature the definition of its formal object presents
.a unique problem. Before the late Middle Ages the concept of a purely private spiritual experience remained largely unknown in Christian

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spirituality and until the seventeenth century even the substantive " my,;·
ticism ", referring to a separate activity, did not exist. H what we now
take to be characteristic were to serve as normative concept, almost all
spiritual writers of the :first Christian millennium and a good many
after that would he excluded. Moreover, the subjective mystical ex·
perience remains inaccessible to the historian. McGinn has wisely confined his subject to the spiritual text in its social and ecclesiastical context. But this choice leads to a further, equally difficult question:
What constitutes a mystical text? Obviously not all religious or theo·
logical writings are mystical. Protestant theologians of the nineteenth
century tended to consider a genuine Christian faith incompatible with
mysticism, while prominent students of mysticism in this century (such
as Underhill, Butler) :remained highly suspicious of speculative theology, including the so-called "mystical" one, But friend and foe of
mysticism agree that the mystical, however conceived, cannot simply
he identified with the religious. Some scholars, such as von Hiigel,
distinguish the mystical from other aspects of religion, but leave its
positive content vague and controvertible. Avoiding a precision which
the nature of the subject precludes, McGinn nevertheless goes to the
heart of the matter in :referring to the mystical as to the dynamic power
that drives the religious mind toward the experienced presence of
God, without necessarily bringing it to the state of full union.
The author's position appears in the felicitous choice of the general
title: The Presence
God. All religious life aims at entering into the
presence of God. But " mystical " religious texts speak of a particular
mode of divine presence, not ordinarily attained within common reli·
gious observance. " What differentiates it from other forms of religious
consciousness is its presentation as both subjectively and objectively
more direct, even at times as immediate" (xix). Obviously this does
not remove all the problems. The history of the recent controversies
about the concept (told in the very informative appendices, pp. 26591) leaves no doubt about that. The author is aware of ,them and
promises to confront them in his final volume. But his caution has not
sufficed to exorcise altogether the subjectivist ghost hidden in the
reference to experience. Thus, he confidently mentions that Plotinus
enjoyed "mystical experiences"
(44) and reopens the question
" whether or not Origen was really a mystic or only a speculative the·
ologian" (130) (though he effectively dispatches it by referring to
the effect of Origen's writings). At the end of this volume he returns
to the controversy concerning Augustine's personal spiritual experience.
Obviously the issue will remain with us as long as we have to apply
modern concepts to traditional theories. Since these concepts are transferred by means of an ancient terminology (with a quite different

BOOK REVIEWS

135

meaning) the semantic ambiguity is likely to continue its confusion
for a long time to come. At least McGinn is fully aware of the pitfalls
and in principle avoids them, despite an occasional slip in practice.
It seems unbecoming to apply small criticism to a work so imposing
by its insight, erudition, and balance. Unfortunately even the most admiring reviewer is expected to search for the imperfections of what
appears well-nigh perfect. Comparing the various sections, then, in
the light of the author's own high standards, the one on Plato appears
weaker. The discussion is limited to a very sketchy analysis of the
three loci classici in Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic VI, and to an
argument of what the author calls Plato's " apophaticism " based on a
Neoplatonic reading of the Parmenides. Such a reading of Plato, via
Pseudo-Dionysius, unquestionably influenced all Christian negative
theology. But negative theology, though not wholly absent from Plato's
definition of the Good, is the very issue that divides Platonism from
Neoplatonism. Some would consider the two page discussion of Gregory
of Nyssa, the only Cappadocian here presented, disappointingly short.
The author justifies this by his "lack of direct influence in the West"
(p. 142). But did Gregory not, directly or indirectly, influence the
early Cistercians and possibly even Augustine? Can one truly claim
that his impact, taken over the whole range of Latin spirituality, was
less than that of Macarius, or even Evagrius? Finally, an error in the
philosophical vocabulary may create needless confusion. The author
indiscriminately uses the terms transcendent and transcendental (e.g.,
on pp. 48, 161), while the latter has become the standard term for
referring to the apriori conditions for the possibility of a particular
phenomenon, a meaning current among several critics mentioned in
the appendices. What surpasses ordinary experience is transcendent.
And there is a minor factual error: the first name of Malevez is
Leopold.
One closes this book with a sense of anticipation and of gratitude.
Bernard McGinn has enriched the knowledge of our spiritual tradition
as no other work in recent memory has done. Only Louis Bouyer's
The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers, the first volume
of a History of Christian Spirituality, could withstand a comparison,
but that early promise was not fulfilled by the later volumes. The
Presence of God initiates a synthesis in scope and depth comparable
only to the analysis of the Dictionnaire de spiritualite. Everything in
this first volume fosters the hope that the author will succeed in his
gigantic enterprise.
LoUIS DUPRE

Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

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Christology and Spirituality. By WILLIAM THOMPSON.
Crossroad, 1991. Pp. 240. $27.50 (hardcover).

New York:

The title of this work would better reflect its content if it were to
read Contemporary Christologies and the French School of Spirituality,
because the author has retrieved the major insights of that school (as
well as those of selected other "incarnational mystics") in order to
correct what he believes to be the imbalances in many contemporary
christologies. Those imbalances, he proposes, are due to an overemphasis on methodology, critical history, and hermeneutics; the corrective supplied by the mystical heritage involves a return to, and a deeper
appreciation of, contemplation, doxology, thanksgiving, praise, and ultimately-and especially-adoration. When this occurs, theology in general and christology in particular become forms of spirituality. Indeed,
if mysticism is defined as " the consciously, deeply, radically, ' accomplished ' living out of Christian spirituality " ( 5) , which itself he
defines as " attunement with the Spirit of Christ " ( 5) , theology and
christology are ultimately called to become forms of mysticism.
Many-if not most-of the themes that Thompson develops are
rooted in the French School of spirituality (whose leading light was
Cardinal Pierre de Berulle, founder of the French Oratory in the early
seventeenth century) : the central focus upon adoration in Christian
life, trinitarian christocentrism, a participative or " luminosity " model
of truth, the significance of Mary as a christological source, the dynamic
between clarity (theological precision) and love (or between " light "
and " fire ") , the narrative or " theomeditative " character of theology
and christology, the relation between "service" and "servitude," the
centrality (and ascetical nature) of Christian experience in theology,
the dialectic between theory and practice in general (or contemplation
and action in particular) , and the importance of penetrating the " inner
meaning " of the " mysteries " of the life of Jesus. These themesespecially the central one of adoration-" reverberate" through the
other members of the French School (Madeleine de Saint-Joseph, JeanJacques Olier, Charles de Condren, St. John Eudes), as well as through
its modern and contemporary representatives (Therese of Lisieux,
Friedrich von Hiigel, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, and John
Wesley).
Given their importance in Thompson's treatment, some words about
three of these themes in particular are in order: adoration, experience,
and practice. The review will conclude with a short discussion of some
correctives that the author proposes to contemporary " christologies
from below" (correctives again rooted in the French School).

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137

Adoration, Thompson holds, is crucial for the Christian life because
only through it can "we move beyond manipulation and narcissistic
possessiveness " in our relation to God; only by it can " we transcend
the manipulative and the objectifying" (19). In adoration, "the focus
shifts from ourselves to the Other " ( 67) and we apprehend, affirm, and
enjoy the giveness of God (103). Following Von Hiigel, to whom
Thompson attributes the modern rehabilitation of the concept, the
"concrete and real" experience of adoration "intensifies the experi·
ence of God's prevenience: the over-againstness of the religious experience, the 'grace' dimension" (103). "Adoration is what happens to love when it reaches sufficient depth" (111) ; it is what happens to contemplation when it reaches its "highest pitch" (136).
The saints and mystics are characterized by the adorational experience
in a " particularly intensified way;" they are " masters of adoration "
(121). Thompson again follows the French School when he stresses
that the incarnation may best he understood as the " irruption within
history of adoration and service " ( 50) . Although, as Berulle puts it,
"from all eternity there had been a God infinitely adorable," there still
"had not been an infinite adorer" before the incarnation (51). The
author agrees that" Jesus' entire being as incarnate is adoration" (51),
and that Jesus, as the "God adoring God, has revealed the adorable
glory of God" (101). Most vitally, the sovereign freedom and transcendence of God vis-a-vis the incarnation-so vital christologicallycan ultimately be recognized only by adoration: " where adoration
weakens, so does incarnational faith," because the "personalization of
God " in the incarnation, inextricably hound up with the supremely
beautiful, sovereignly free subject, is compromised (165). Thompson
returns again and again to these themes throughout the book, and
adoration may well he the key concept in his whole attempt to retrieve
the mystical tradition from contemporary christology.
As stated previously, Thompson understands the turn to spirituality
to he essentially a turn " to the fullness of Christian experience " ( 188) .
The critical work of reason in christology must always " stay close to
the fullness of experience, promoting moments of luminosity and serving such luminosity" (187). In a special way, the "saints learn their
theology from their experience" (123). He paraphrases Balthasar in
giving a particularly powerful example of this: the mystical experience
of the dark night ·Of the soul can light
... up for us the death experience and 'tomb' experience of Jesus,
about which otherwise we would know very little. . . . Jesus ' descent into
hell ' has light indirectly thrown upon it through the dark night experience of the mystim, whose stripping of narcissism and identification with
the forgotten and ' damned ' seems to be an ' experiential analogue ' to
Jesus, making sense only in the light of Jesus (125-6).

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The author stresses that the turn to experience which is part and parcel
of the turn to spirituality contains a strong and intrinsic ascetical di·
mension that must apply to the work of theology as well. This asceti·
cism is " a disciplined manner of staying attuned to the lessons of
Christian experience and the Christian narrative "; it is a " testing of
experience " which highlights the fact that " experience is a dangerous
reality, fraught with 'peril'" (a word related to it through the Latin
periculum) (11). Asceticism is a disciplined way of proving "the
authentic from the inauthentic," in which the perils of experience are
minimalized, ;;ind the benefits maximalized. This ascesis is that part
of the spirituality of theology which pertains to
. . . the discipline of sustained theological conversations, the humility of
submitting one's labors to the judgment of one's colleagues, [and] the
labors of attempting to ' master ' the various theological methodologies
(12).

He even refers to this theological ascesis as the " stigmata of the in·
tellect," which indicates "that learning is in the service of ... cruci·
form love, and not of one's own pet theories" (12).
Chapter 9 is devoted to questions revolving around the relationship
between contemplation and action. Thompson uses the term " prac·
tice " in the sense usually reserved for " praxis," defining it as " activity that has been reflected upon, learned from, refined " ( 173) ; it is
"humanly and Christianly meaningful doing" (175). In "practice",
theory and " activity " coalesce, the former involving a reflection on
the latter. Theologies which stress this practical dimension-such as
sociopolitical and feminist ones-are characterized by
. . . a willingness to stay attuned to the lessons of practical experience, a
resulting ' discovery' of what isn't ' practical' or ' liberating ', a search·
ing out of the causes for this in past and present, and the proposal of
more ' liberating-practical' alternatives on the basis of human and Chris·
tian sources, past and present (174).

Theory and activity can only be kept " in fruitful union and com·
munion" by contemplation; it is indeed only in a "contemplative
style of theology " that intellectual efforts are kept rooted in the fullness of experience, and so the turn to experience itself signifies " the
turn to spirituality, mysticism, and the contemplative in theology and
christology" (176). And as contemplation inexorably leads to adora·
tion, so too must practice. The author's strong trinitarian emphasis is
also evident in this discussion, when he considers the Father, Son, and
Spirit to be the "ground and enabler," respectively, of "Contemplation, Theory, and Practice" (179).
Thompson feels that many modern and contemporary " christologies
from below " could benefit from correctives offered from the tradition

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139

of spirituality, especially that of the French School. For instance, the
emphasis in " christologies from below " on " explanation " needs to
be balanced by the French School's emphasis upon " understanding ";
their negative and pessimistic " hermeneutics of suspicion " by trust,
optimism, and " affirmation " ; the central concepts of the " Jesus of
History" and the "Christ of Faith'', by the states of Jesus as "voy·
ager " and " comprehensor "; the exclusive emphasis on the Bible,
by a greater appreciation of the fathers (and "mothers") of the
Church as christological sources; their stress on service, by that of
adoration; and finally ,the "fact-fetishism" of most "christologies from
below " by a penetration of the interior meaning or depth dimension
of the mysteries of Christ (76-8). The chapter on the Virgin Mary as
a christological source also clearly implies that modern and contemporary indifference to mariology in " christologies from below " leads
to "massive christological inadequacy" (135). For Thompson,
The Marian dimension now is the soteriological side of christology, its
' for us ' dimension. In terms of grace: grace not only as offer, but as
transforming reality. . . . The fact that grace is now effective in history
through Mary highlights the historical dimension of Christian revelation,
and with that, the ecclesial dimension .... ' Grace '-as offer, as received,
as personally unique and intimate-is the ' Marian ' dimension of christology. Or at least an important part of it (154-5).

The author stresses throughout that the proper context for christology
is a " trinitarian christocentrism," in which the dynamic between
Father, Son, and Spirit is fully recognized in the particular event of
incarnation. The trinitarian doctrine may be summarized as follows:
God as distinctly the Transcendent (=Father) ; God as individuatedly
personable ( =Son, to whom it thus belongs in sovereign freedom to become incarnate); God as individuatedly participable (=Spirit) (161).

Christological dangers arise when too great an emphasis is placed upon
any one of the persons to the detriment of the others:
Father-christologies tend to become non-trinitarian monotheisms and low
christologies without the 'balance' of Son-christologies. They also tend
in the direction of deism and christologies that view Jesus as only a
kind of model to be imitated without the Spirit-christologies. Son-christologies tend toward a 'Jesus-monism' or fetishism, without the balance
of the Father-christologies, which bring out the universality of the divine
ground. Without a Spirit-christology, Son-christologies tend to render our
own participation in Jesus impossible; he becomes so singular that he is
removed from sharing in the human condition. Spirit-christologies, as we
can guess, can tend to collapse christology into salvation. They stress
our own participation in God, but sometimes at the expense of the
uniqueness of Jesus as the disclosure of God's own uniquely personal
presence for us (41) .

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The " christocentrism " that Thompson speaks of must recognize the
absolute definitiveness and uniqueness of the " divinely personalized
amorization " that has taken place in the incarnation. From this radical
personalization of God necessarily follows the " scandal of particular·
ity", which includes Jesus' "maleness (sex and gender)." We should
not, he believes, "think that Jesus' humanity (and maleness) is
' insignificant ':"
A Logos asarkos approach to the Incarnation, which tries to detach
Jesus' divinity from his particular humanity, in the end depersonalizes
God and renders impossible the intimate and personal communion to
which we are invited by the Spirit (170).

Thompson himself recognizes that certain modern christologians may
well find themselves "repulsed" (and others "thrilled") when confronted with the " elevations and contemplations " of Berulle in par·
ticular and the mystical tradition in general ( 64). Perhaps, he thinks,
such theologians
will find the 'mystical ' interpretation a form of projection, lacking any
historical basis in the text. Perhaps, too, not enough of the struggling,
growing, perhaps unknowing humanity of it all, and of Jesus as well,
might come through for this person. History, if you will, seems smothered
in mystical dreaminess.
And the concerns of political and liberation
theologies? Where is there room for that in this highly individualistic
rnading of Jesus? And much more (64).

" Repulsed " is certainly not the word that applies to this reviewer's
reaction to the writings of the French School, nor to this book's attempt
to reappropriate its insights for contemporary christology. But neither
is "thrilled ". Thompson has rendered an important service by pointing out possible contributions of the mystical tradition to ' christologies
from below ', a service that should be appreciated by all. It is a service,
however, that perhaps labors too heavily under the author's own affection for the French School, and results in what some might consider an
equally one-sided " christology from above", shorn of important insights of christological thinking during the past century.
EDWARD

Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
Berkeley, Calif omia

L. KRASEVAC, O.P.

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141

La Doctrine de la Revelation Divine de Saint Thomas D'Aquin:
Actes du Symposium sur la Pensee de Saint Thomas d' Aquin,
recueil puhlie sous la direction de LfoN ELDERS, S.V.D. in Studi
Tomistici 37. Pontificia Academia di S. Tommaso, Lihreria Editrice Vaticana, 1990. Pp. 278. 30,000.00 lire.
This collection of essays by distinguished scholars presents the acts
of a conference on the doctrine of Revelation according to Saint Thomas
Aquinas. The volume contains twelve papers, four in French, four in
English and four in German. The contributors are, in alphabetical
order: A. Blanco, G. Cottier, O.P., Ph. Delhaye, L. Elders, S.V.D., L.
Hodl, B. McGregor, O.P., J. H. Nicolas, O.P., L. Scheffczyk, R. Schenk,
O.P., J. Schumacher, P. Stohr, and J. P. Torrell, O.P. The ground
covered by their articles is as broad as the horizon of their authors.
Aquinas's doctrine is confronted with problems ranging from the
modernist crisis to those currently discussed in missiology.
In theology, when one associates Revelation with Thomism, one is
forced to think of Father Garrigou-Lagrange's De Revelatione, truly a
landmark in the history of modern theology. Reading it, one cannot
help hut to he impressed by the mastery and the clarity with which this
eminent Dominican theologian of the antimodernist period disputes and
refutes the arguments which threatened the Church at the beginning of
the twentieth century. Unfortunately, Garrigou-Lagrange's hook has
never been translated into modern languages. And yet, in a certain way,
volume 37 of Studi Tomistici can substitute for it, since it deals with
issues closely related to those which Garrigou-Lagrange addressed in
his study of Revelation. It also recasts the discussion in the terms in
which it is expressed in the theological field today. For this reason,
this volume provides a valuable resource for the contemporary student
of theology for whom the details of the modernist crisis in the early
part of this century have not only faded with time, hut also have become less pressing due to the complexity of the problematic which retains the attention of theologians in the post-Vatican II period.
The focus of this collection of papers is the epistemology of divine
Revelation, to the point that this could he its subtitle. Ten of the twelve
articles deal with this question. Only Delhaye's paper ventures outside
of the field of epistemology to cover the topic of morals, while Horl
takes up the ecumenical question.
Scheffczyk's article provides a broad perspective on the evolution and
the perenniality of the modernist/antimodernist problematic in theology.
He shows that the root of the problem lies in the epistemology of the

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Enlightenment, i.e. in idealism, which imposed itself as the philosophy
of the anticlerical nineteenth century. In the last part of his paper he
demonstrates how Saint Thomas's theology provides the insights neces·
sary to articulate the doctrinal unity which exists between the teaching
on Revelation found in Vatican I and that of Vatican II. He draws the
reader's attention to the notion of degrees of Revelation whose culminating point is indeed the beatific vision and which is prepared for by
a historical unfolding. Schumacher and Stohr also deal with the
modernist's characterization of the traditional scholastic doctrine of
Revelation as an imparting of propositions. Schumacher reviews the
theory of Revelation of several of the modernist theologians. A com·
mon characteristic of these theories is an idealist epistemology that re·
duces the life of the intellect to its immanent part and thus renders impossible God's communication of intelligible truths without violating
the laws of Nature. Stohr, on the other hand, investigates current theological theories and shows how Rahner and Schillebeeckx encounter the
same difficulty with the intelligible content of Revelation because of
their attempts to reconcile the Gospel's claim of effectiveness in chang·
ing lives with idealist philosophy.
With respect to the main line of inquiry, Nicolas's paper deals explicitly with epistemology of Revelation. This study of the " epistemo·
logical aspects of Revelation " has two parts. In the first, Nicolas provides a commentary on S.Th. la q. 12, a. 12. He presents clearly the
Thomistic argument for the knowledge of God from creatures, which
he summarizes with a quotation from pseudo-Dionysius found in Saint
Thomas's commentary on Boethius's De Trinitate: "Deum tanquam
ignotum cognoscere." He articulates the interesting paradox between
similitude and dissimilitude between God and His creatures, of which
he gives a synthetic presentation: "Si L'exemplarite est une propriete
de la cause efficiente, la ressemblance est une propriete de l'effet, mais
cette ressemblance est imparfaite precisement clans la mesure oil il est
plus completement effet" (p. 157). In the second part of his paper,
Nicolas treats the use of analogy in sacra doctrina, which he terms the·
ological analogy in contrast to metaphysical analogy. He looks at
analogy both at the level of concepts and at the level of judgment.
First, he shows how human concepts are brought to a further actuality
by Revelation, which extends their usage to an " analogicity " unforeseeable outside of the event of Revelation. In his treatment of
analogy at the level of judgment, Nicolas ·expands on a view presented
earlier, that is, the understanding of the three modi of theological predication as rules of predication. For Nicolas, the rules of negation and
eminence are the necessary correctives to the use of causality in divine
predication. He concludes by showing how this applies to the understanding of Trinitarian Revelation and theology.

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143

Elders and Torrell grace this collection of essays with their excellent
studies of two indispensable elements of the Thomistic theology of
Revelation: Scripture--on one hand-as a medium of Revelation, and
prophecy-on the other hand-which makes it possible for God to reveal what is not evident for the human intellect and for men to realize
that Scripture indeed contains an intelligible content and not only the
recording of and the call to enter into an experiential encounter with
God's self-Revelation. Elders's paper develops along the lines of the
mutual relationship of Revelation and Sacred Scripture. In the beginning, he clearly states the crucial role of Saint Thomas's realist epistemology as the foundation of his theology of Sacred Scripture. The second
and larger part of this study addresses the fascinating question of the
multiplicity of the senses of Scripture. Fr. Elders presents Saint
Thomas's argument as found in Quodl. VII, q. 6, which he offers as an
ingenious answer to the question of what precisely is revealed in Scripture. He invites the reader to measure the contemporary attitude towards the Bible with the one that was common for most of the life of
the Church. As Elders puts it with a quotation from de Lubac: " They
felt that the literal sense of the text was not the only reason why the
Bible had been given to them " (de Lubac, Exegese medievale, I, 484,
p. 140). Elders also insists on the ecclesial dimension of Scripture,
which alone permits the theologian to discover revealed meanings in
texts whose content is an inspired account of historical events (p. 151).
Torrell's paper presents a very enlightening commentary on the
treatise on prophecy found at the end of the Secunda Pars of the Summa
Theologiae. He shows how strongly rooted in Scripture Saint Thomas's
theology is with respect to the structure of the treatise as well as to the
material brought forward to explain the conclusions he reaches, which
have great relevance for the contemporary debate concerning biblical sources. The most interesting part of his article is the comparison
of prophetic knowledge with natural knowledge (pp. 181-85). In
this section of his paper, Torrell carefully follows the details of Saint
Thomas's analysis in /la /Jae q. 173, a. 2. Prophecy remains human in
its mode of knowing. Since human knowledge is realized by the illumination of the intelligible species by the agent intellect, God's intervention in either element does not destroy what constitutes the specificity
of human knowledge, i.e., the abstraction of the intelligible from the
sensible. However, as Torrell says it: "Ce qui est vraiment constitutif
de charisme prophetique, c'est la lumiere parce qu'elle permet le jugement: formale in cognitione prophetica est lumen divinum " ( q. 171
a. 3 ad 3, p. 183). Torrell reproaches Aquinas for not being a faithful
enough follower of Aristotle in his acceptance of a divine intervention
in imagination independently of the input of the senses. He thus writes;

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" De la sorte, !'immanence de la connaissance selon Aristote se trouve
serieusement compromise " (p. 186) . One could wonder if this reluc·
tance to admit an intervention of God in the creation of a new phantasm
does not originate in some kind of concession to the virulent criticisms
which the modernists leveled against the traditional theology of Revelation in the Church rather than in the account the prophets have left us
of the irruption of prophecy in their lives.
Cottier's paper turns to the other side of the epistemological question,
that is, to the contribution of the human intellect in the reception of
Revelation. In treating the grounds for the credibility of Revelation,
the author follows closely the thought of Aquinas in the Summa Contra
Gentiles, where Saint Thomas articulates the credibility of the doctrine
of faith, not by proving it, but rather by showing that the reasons
brought forward to object to its rationality are Hawed. Cottier's main
point is that there cannot be a real dialogue between faith and reason
if reason is understood in terms of positivistic rationalism. He reminds
us of Aquinas's emphasis on the too often forgotten quest for wisdom,
a prerequisite for the human reason to be open to the possibility of
faith. For this he explains that : "La ratio dont nous parlons tout au
long de cet article est la raison metaphysique " (p. 221) . He also
points out how important signs are for Aquinas because: " Ils ont pour
but de confirmer ce que la connaissance naturelle ne peut directement
saisir" (p. 222). To be accepted for what they are, signs require to
be considered with an unwavering intellectual rectitude. In this domain one should note that: "depuis le temps de la Reforme l'Eglise
est contestee pour ainsi dire a priori, meme de la part des chretiens;
le regard porte sur elle est sans bienveillance et partiel " (p. 223) .
The question of whether there is an intelligible content in Revelation
extends to Christology. Blanco addresses it in the form of a study of
Saint Thomas's commentary on John 14, 6: "Ego sum Via et Veritas et
Vita." It is because he is the Word that Christ is the Truth and the
Life and because of his Incarnation that he is the Way. Christ is the
summit of Revelation precisely because he is the Word of God. Saint
Thomas's philosophy of knowledge and his understanding of the role
of words in the communication of truth enable him to articulate a
theology of Revelation that makes room for the disclosure of the divine mystery and the communication of knowledge: "Homo potest
conceptum suum alteri homini revelare. Hoc autem est eum loqui "
(Quoted p. 35) . Blanco insists that the word is a sign of what is in the
soul and that this is why it enables interpersonal communication to
take place. He spends much time dealing with Schillebeeckx's position
on faith considered as hermeneutics of historical events. According to
this view, the content of Revelation comes from human activity. Fol·
lowing Aquinas's treatment of faith, Blanco finds a role for sense ex·

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145

perience in the prompting of man to believe. " In order to believe in
God who reveals himself, man accepts His word as the beginning of
his own thought, as the source of knowledge, since he holds as true
what this word communicates to him. In this way he will participate in
the knowledge of which this word is an expression; he receives in his
mind the divine Truth " (p. 45) . Blanco is aware of the need to balance this view with a sense of dialogue to which contemporary theology
is sensitive. He points out that in the gift of prophecy God's use of
the elements of the " mental world " of the prophet constitutes a form
of dialogue.
Schenk's study of Saint Thomas's understanding of the traditional
axiom " omnis Christi actio nostra est instructio " points out the need
of a transformation of man's interior world to see in Christ a true and
faithful revealer of God. He intends two things in doing so: first, to
bring hack into Christology the study of the deeds of Christ and, second, to restate the necessity of theological faith in order to carry out
that study. In detailing the different ways in which Saint Thomas has
understood and utilized this saying, Schenk shows the need to discern
the hearing of the hypostatic union on our understanding of the deeds
of Christ. Some actions show his divinity, some the truth of his
humanity. In moving the scope of his study to the resurrection of
Christ, Schenk follows Aquinas on the question of the insufficiency of
these signs and the need for the gift of faith. This is a controversial
point, especially in Protestant theology. For this reason, the author goes
on to examine the theology of the cross as he finds it in Aquinas in
order to show that only an explicit faith in the divinity of Christ allows
the Christian to penetrate the fullness of what is revealed by the cross:
" This dimension of the cross, salvific by means of the humanity hut
non nisi ex virtute divinitatis, reflects a dimension of the whole earthly
ministry. The theocentricity corresponds on the epistemological level
to the non-manifest character of the claim posed by Jesus' deeds and
doctrine " (p. 130) .
Finally, McGregor's paper takes the issue of content in Revelation
to the field of missiology and addresses with warmth and courage the
ultimate consequences of the modernist crisis. The doctrine of a content-free Revelation has as its complement the assumption of a possible
revelation in non-Christian religions. In response, McGregor presents
forcefully Aquinas's teaching of the need for an explicit faith in the
Trinity and the Incarnation in order to he saved.
Both for its overall scope and for the detail with which it treats the
critical issues in the theology of Revelation raised over the last hundred
years, this 37th volume of Studi Tomistici is a valuable asset in the
study of fundamental ·theology. However, one could have hoped that

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the years passed since Father Garrigou-Lagrange last published his De
Revelatione would have allowed Thomistic scholars to retrieve and de·
velop Aquinas's theological insights in their fullness. The danger of
apologetics is that it can lead one to develop a teaching only along the
lines set by those challenging the traditional teaching of the Church.
In this particular instance, the Catholic apologists of the antimodernist
period were led to overstress the epistemological dimension of the
theology of Revelation, leaving unstated that for Saint Thomas the
primary term of analysis in this question is the knowledge of God. The
need of Revelation for Saint Thomas stems from the call to man to
share in the beatific vision. A paper on the relation of finality between
faith and the beatific vision would have underlined the originality and
true significance of the Thomistic tradition in theology.
JOSEPH D'AMECOURT, F.J.
Saint John's Priory
Laredo, Texas

The Eternity of the World in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas and his
Contemporaries. Edited by J. B. M. WISSINK. Studien und Texte
zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, edited by A. ZIMMERMAN,
vol. 27. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990. Pp. viii+ 100. $28.75 (paper).
This volume contains six short studies by five different scholars from
the Netherlands on a topic accurately indicated by its title. These
studies are a product of a symposium held by the Thomas Aquinas
Workgroup, a scholarly association dedicated to investigating the
thesis " that Aquinas first of all has to be understood as a theologian "
and to " a rediscovery of the original Aquinas and his authentic
thought" (p. vii). The topic chosen for these studies is a suitable one
for the aims of the Workgroup, for it is one that requires a clear dis·
tinction to be made between the realms of philosophy and theology, and
it is one that has generated much interest and dispute-in the Middle
Ages no less than today. This small collection of studies makes a con·
tribution to scholarship, although there are weaknesses in some of the
studies, as I shall note.
F. J. A. de Grijs (pp. 1-8) argues that Thomas's purpose in writing
the De aeternitate mundi was theological rather than philosophical in
that Thomas provides a meditation on the meaning of eternity. This
meditation, so de Grijs argues, is not only about the temporal eternity
of the world but is even more about God's eternity. It shows us how

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little we grasp of God's duration, or how we do not understand it rather
than how we do understand it. J. A. Aertsen (pp. 9-19) ·responds to
de Grijs by arguing that the work has a philosophical character. First,
Aertsen explains, the fact that Thomas begins the De aeternitate mundi
with the supposition on faith that the world had a temporal beginning
in the past does not of itself (as de Grijs had thought) mean that the
work is theological. Rather, it simply means that all believers agree
that in fact the world had a temporal beginning, but the question at
issue remains a philosophical one: could the world possibly have existed
eternally in the past? Second, Aertsen points out that the reasoning in
the De aeternitate mundi is much like that of Thomas's Disputed Question De potentia Dei, q. 3, a. 14, which has an explicitly philosophical character. Third, Thomas has already made it clear in his Commentary on the Sentences, bk. 2, d. 1, q. 1, a. 2, that the doctrine of
creation, excluding the part of the doctrine that the world had a temporal beginning, is philosophically knowable in principle and known to
philosophers in fact. Since the fact of creation is philosophically knowable and can he demonstrated without prejudice to the question of
eternity, it cannot he said that an eternal past existence is incompatible
with creation. Hence, the question of the compatibility of being eternal
and being created-the very question for the De aeternitate mundi-is
regarded by Thomas as philosophical rather than as theological.
Aertsen's criticisms of de Grijs are sound, yet de Grijs's central point
can he saved. De Grijs has been attempting to support a claim made
earlier by the late James Weisheipl, O.P., who had argued that the De
aeternitate mundi was· a fundamentally theological work. Weisheipl's
point, however, was not that the arguments in the work were theological
in character hut that the target of the work was theologians, especially
those who followed Bonaventure in seeing an incompatibility between
being created and being temporally eternal in the past. Theological
arguments, according to Thomas, must he based upon revealed authority, but the arguments in the De aeternitate mundi are not based on
such authority, and hence cannot he considered to he theological.
Nevertheless, the arguments can have a theological purpose insofar as
they remove a philosophical confusion in order to help theologians
better understand creation.
P. van Veldhuijsen (pp. 20-38) provides a generally sound inter·
pretation when he compares the doctrines of Bonaventure and Thomas
on the possibility of an eternally created world. He is to be commended for seeing that the principal dispute between Bonaventure and
Thomas is over the problem of whether something created out of nothing could also have existed eternally in the past, and that the dispute
is not, as many scholars have thought, over the question of whether a
past eternal temporal duration is possible or not. Yet van Veldhuijsen

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is open to criticism in claiming that Bonaventure regards the creation,
and hence the temporal beginning, of the world as demonstrable. When
Bonaventure treats the question of creation out of nothing formally he
makes no claims for philosophy on the doctrine. Rather, he says that
philosophers have in fact failed to understand creation out of nothing
and that reason does not disagree with the faith. Note: he does not
claim that reason proves the doctrine of faith, but only that reason is
not in disagreement with faith-and he shows this by refuting the
arguments in opponendo which pretend to disagree with the faith.
M. F. J.M. Hoenen (pp. 39-68) shows how Thomas's doctrine on the
eternity of the world was reported by William de la Mare in his Correctorium Fratris Thomae and also in five of the responses to William,
which are known as the Correctoria corruptorii. Hoenen brings to light
which of the works of Thomas were involved in the dispute between
William and his responders, how Thomas was quoted or reported on
both sides, and what particular problems were argued about. It is interesting to note, for example, that Thomas's Aristotelian commentaries
and his De aeternitate mundi were almost completely absent from this
debate. Hoenen thinks that the omission of these works is decisive in
showing that these works must not have been available to the debaters,
for otherwise they surely would have been used in the debate. As
Hoenen is attempting to show how Thomas was known to the debaters,
it is unfortunate that he does not give a general assessment of how well
Thomas was interpreted by them, although he does give some instances
of how Thomas was misrepresented.
In a second contribution, P. van Veldhuijsen (pp. 69-81) gives a re·
port of Richard of Middleton's criticisms of Thomas Aquinas on the
topic of this volume. We are promised that Richard has an " original
criticism " of Thomas and that Richard " gives an interpretation of
Thomas on eternal creation and conservation that is essential for a
clear understanding of Thomas's position." In fact, however, the posi·
tion of Richard contains little that has not already been found in Bona·
venture. Like Bonaventure, Richard sees the fundamental problem in
the Thomistic position to be that creation is regarded as a mutatio or a
facere such that the created thing, precisely in order to be created,
must have being temporally after non-being. Since Richard cannot ac·
cept the central Thomistic point that creation out of nothing is indifferent to temporal beginning or eternal duration, it is hard to see how
Richard's doctrine is essential for a clear understanding of Thomas.
Finally, J. M. M. H. Thijssen (pp. 82-100) examines the response
of Henry of Harclay ( d. 1317) to Thomas Aquinas on eternity and
infinity. Thijssen introduces his study with the general claim that the
analysis of the infinite is "in itself a mathematical subject" (p. 83).
Now it is true that Henry treats the problem as a mathematical prob-

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lem, but Thomas follows Aristotle in seeing the problem of the infinite
primarily as a problem in natural philosophy and only secondarily as
a problem in mathematics. The natural philosopher realizes that the
infinite is a kind of potential reality, of which more can always be
taken, but never something actually infinite. The mathematician, however, who has abstracted from signate and common matter, might be
tempted, as Henry was, to think of mathematical infinities as actual
infinities. Henry, thinking about sets of numbers, is involved in the
business of comparing smaller and larger infinite sets. For Henry such
sets are actually infinite. But Thomas, thinking of past time as a
natural philosopher would, argues that the reality of past time is a
reality of successive events. That is, the events of the past are now not
actual, and so it makes no sense to speak of the past as an actual in·
finity. Henry, as it turns out, reaches roughly the same conclusion as
Thomas-that the world could have existed eternally in the past-but
for very different reasons. Henry argues that mathematical infinities
can be traversed; Thomas argues that past time is no longer actual and
hence can not be thought to be an actual infinity, even if the world
were eternal. Thijssen's study, though helpful, does not bring out
this basic difference of method between Thomas and Henry.
Thijssen concludes his study with a brief explanation that Thomas
of Wilton (fl. 1314·1320) shows a dependence upon Henry in presenting his own arguments on the eternity of the world, and that William
of Alnwick ( d. 1333) is dependent upon both Henry and Thomas. This
intellectual relationship has been shown in much greater detail by
Richard Dales in his fine book, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity
of the World, which has appeared too recently, unfortunately, to have
been available to Thijssen.
STEVEN

St. Thomas More College
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

BALDNER

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Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and
Philosophical Theology. Edited by SCOTT MACDONALD. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. 328. $43.95 cloth, $14.95
paper.
The quality of these (mostly) new essays and the modest price make

Being and Goodness recommendable, almost as two anthologies in one.
This ambitious collection has a split personality: careful interpretations
of medieval texts (in part I) are yoked to intriguing contributions to
contemporary discussions in metaethics and philosophical theology (in
part II).
Four essays by Eleonore Stump, Norman Kretzman, or both, appear
to he the heart and inspiration of this anthology. Their contributions
are about 40% of the length of the volume; and their collaborative
essay, "Being and Goodness" (the only reprinted essay included), pro·
vides both the collection's title and its theme, which is to enrich con·
temporary debate in philosophical theology and virtue ethics by :mining
the resources of the ancient and medieval tradition that " the terms
' being ' and 'goodness ' are the same in reference, differing only in
sense"
99).
Other contributors (Scott MacDonald, Jan A. Aertsen, Ralph Mc·
Inerny, Mark D. Jordan, and Jorge J. E. Gracia analyze medieval texts
in the tradition from Augustine to Suarez; William E. Mann and
Thomas V. Morris contribute essays in philosophical theology) do not
integrate historical analysis and original speculation. The editor frames
this collection with a fine introductory survey of the being/ goodness
tradition from Plato through the Middle Ages, a considerable (13 page)
bibliography, and a new translation of Boethi.us's De hebdomadibus,
which was an influential text in the tradition.
There are two distinct ways of conceiving the necessary connection
between being and goodness. The " participation approach," which
sees being as metaphysically and causally dependent upon goodness,
tends to a theological and relational account of goodness: creatures are
good only because they are created by God, who is goodness in itself.
The "nature approach," on the other hand, derives from Aristotle and
tends to neither a theological nor a relational account of goodness. It
identifies the good with the end, or telos of a being: an existing thing
is good when it fully actualizes its intrinsic nature. The tension he
tween these approaches can lead to confusion or to fruitful synthesis.
For example, Albert the Great took up contradictory accounts of goodness in part hecause he failed to distinguish the two senses of " end "
{as intention and as nature) characteristic of the pm:ticipation and
0

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nature approaches, according to MacDonald's "The Metaphysics of
Goodness and the Doctrine of the Transcendentals." On the other hand,
Aquinas successfully combined approaches in his exploration of the
tension between the views that ' good ' is a common name applicable
to all beings (Aristotelian) and that only God is 'good' (Platonic),
argues Jan A. Aer·tsen in "Good as Transcendental and the Transcendence of the Good."
Stump and Kretzmann begin " Being and Goodness " with a lucid
summary and defense of Aquinas's metaethics as a worthy contender
for " the metaethical foundation that recent virtue-centered morality
has been criticized for lacking" (p. 98). Aquinas's view that goodness
is a property which supervenes upon a natural property, the actualiza·
tion of the individual's " substantial form," follows the nature approach.
Their derivation of Aquinas's normative ethical rules from this metae·
thics responds to critics who claim virtue-theoretical approaches do not
illumine the role of deontological rules in morality. They explore implications for theories of religious ethics (the divine-command theory is
avoided) and certain solutions to the problem of evil; these explorations
are relatively undeveloped, but intriguing.
Stump builds on this collaborative essay in her "Aquinas on Faith
and Goodness" when she argues that Aquinas's being/ goodness meta·
ethics explains why God would want humans to accept propositions
about God on faith rather than knowledge, why having faith is meri·
torious, and why epistemological weighing of evidence plays only a
minor part in adult religious conversions. Stump's conclusions are
based on her thesis that when one assents to the proposition " God
exists" on faith, one is "metaphysically justified" in this belief because one hungers for perfect goodness, perfect goodness entails perfect
being, and perfect being must exist in the actual world. That is, the
being/ goodness identity logically ensures that what one hungers for
(perfect goodness) exists. (One is not "epistemically justified," how·
ever, in believing one is justified in believing God exists.) She promises that similar arguments will show we are metaphysically justified in
accepting the other "propositions of faith," Christian claims which are
appropriately accepted on faith (p. 199). Yet this promise is implau·
sible. If Stump were correct, all propositions of faith would be neces·
sarily true because the only reason one is metaphysically justified in
believing God exists is that the object of one's hunger necessarily exists,
which is to say " God exists " is necessarily true. Yet surely some
religiously important propositions about the acts of God are contingent·
ly true.
Norman Kretzmann in two essays discusses whether God is significantly free in choosing (1) whether to create and (2) what to create.
Kretzmann claims that God necessarily (though "willingly") creates,

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God necessarily creates persons with free will, hut God otherwise exer·
cises free will in selecting which creatures to create. Kretzmann argues
(contra Aquinas) that from Aquinas's being/goodness metaethics and
the " Dionysian Principle" (" Goodness is by its very nature diffusive
of itself and [thereby] of being") it follows that God necessarily
creates because creativity is an aspect of God's nature. Kretzmann sug·
gests this diffusion of God's goodness in creation essentially involves
"representation" of God's goodness to an audience, to an interpreter
who responds to God in personal relationship. Yet these claims are not
sufficient to establish Kretzmann's necessitarian views. Perhaps, as
Peter Geach has argued, God's self-diffusive love is sufficiently expressed and received by the divine persons within the Trinitarian Godhead, leaving God undetermined whether to create at all. Here K:retzmann shifts his ground: he grants these " divine persons " respond to
God's love, hut notes they are not capable "of rejecting as well as of
participating in God's love" (p. 246). Kretzmann's supposition is that
(created, but not divine?) personhood entails libertarian freedom.
To the Leibnizian conundrum that God must create the best possible
world, Kretzmann defends Aquinas's solution that possible worlds are
comparable in value, but no possible world could be better than every
other possible world. William E. Hann, in "The Best of All Possible
Worlds " defends an alternative solution: that possible worlds are
grouped in clusters by similarity, and that they are comparable within
those dusters, hut between the clusters possible worlds are incommensurable. Mann defends this hypothesis with the proposal that some
life-plans are neither better, worse, nor equal to others. Possible worlds
go into incommensurable dusters because agents can choose from such
alternative life-plans. Both Kretzmann and Mann make important contributions to the possible worlds debate.
The being/ goodness tradition is congenial to " perfect being theology " which derives the actual existence and other properties of God
from a central assumption that God is the greatest possible being. fo
"Metaphysical Dependence, Independence, and Perfection " Thomas
V. Morris derives that central assumption of perfect-being theology
from metaphysical claims which are attractive to any traditional theist,
including theists who espouse a creation-theology (deriving the actual
existence and other properties of God from the idea that God is the
creator of everything which does or might exist) . He also argues
(contra Mann) that perfect-being theology does nol: imply, by way of
considerations of divine independence, the doctrine of divine simplicity
(including spatial-, 'temporal-, or property -simplicity) .
Being and Goodness rewards with stimulating speculation in virtuethooretic :m.etaethics and philosophical theology, and with responses to

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153

a number of common criticisms of the being/ goodness tradition. Except by Stump's and Kretzmann's essays, I am not encouraged to explore
the medieval resources in the tradition, but I expect more encouragement will be forthcoming from the authors in this anthology.
ROBERT B. KRUSCHWITZ
Georgetown College
Georgetown, Kentucky

Being and Knowing: Reflections of a Thomist. By FREDERICK D. WIL·
HELMSEN. Albany, N.Y.: Preserving Christian Publications, 1991.
Pp. 282. $25.00 (cloth) ; $12.00 (paper).

In this book Dr. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen has gathered many opuscula, most of them articles previously published in journals such as
The Thomist. They are not, however, a random assortment of short
works, herded together under a somewhat arbitrary rubric, as such
collections are notoriously apt to be. They all fit happily under the
heading, " Being and Knowing," and are arranged in an order that
shows careful thought: the first chapter deals with the character of
metaphysics, following chapters deal with the metaphysics of esse, then
further chapters carry the principles already enunciated into various
special fields (such as computers, the modern self, and communication),
with two final chapters that take the reader into the borderland of
philosophy and faith.
Wilhelmsen is well known as a vigorous exponent of what is called
"existential Thomism." Although acknowledging the influence of
Etienne Gilson, Wilhelmsen develops his thought in a way that is his
own; he does not deserve to be hailed or dismissed on the basis of a
handy tag. Certainly, for him, the doctrine of Thomas on esse is at
the center, and radiates its light upon the whole of philosophy (not to
say theology) . But not only does Wilhelmsen expound this doctrine
with special clarity and trenchancy; he shows its illuminative power in
many fields of special contemporary interest, not least in radical critique of modernity-of the Cartesian ego and of the demiurgic attitude
towards the world.
Polemic purposes, both with respect to the whole modern demarche
in philosophy and with respect to Thomisms of other stripes, are often
present, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit. He obviously stands
in opposition to the deep assumptions underlying the Cartesian revolution and exercising sway over later thought. :J3ut he also finds much to

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fault in would-be Thomists who do not sufficiently subordinate essentia
to esse or who adopt a transcendental approach. Chapters VIII and IX
exemplify the former confrontation with regard to the modern ego and
its self-consciousness. Chapter IV casts a disapproving eye upon the
primacy of the question as this is upheld by some eminent transcendental Thomists.
An especially fine piece of work, in this reviewer's opinion, is Wilhelmsen's study in Chapter VI of the relation of creation. The author
thinks along with St. Thomas in developing the paradox of two-way
priority as between the creature as substance and its relation to the
God who creates it. The result is a combination of sharpness in distinguishing and depth in penetrating the ingredients of the solution:
esse, divine and creaturely; esse and essentia; substance and accident;
relation, real and mental-a masterly exposition of notions at the core
of Thomistic metaphysics.
I would mention also, particularly for its provocative contrasting of
the iconic with the ironic, Chapter X, " The Philosophy of Communication." Wilhelmsen shows that he is wide awake to the current cultural
scene and familiar with those who represent it and shape it. Here and
elsewhere we find the " creativity " which he sees, in Chapter One, as
belonging to metaphysics.
Being and Knowing is a work that belongs on the shelves of all persons interested in Thomas and Thomism, in metaphysics, and in the
philosophic ailments of our time and their cure., (One should also, at
least parenthetically, congratulate the publishers, Preserving Christian
Publications, for their effort to make more accessible such studies as
those assembled in this volume. And perhaps one could be forgiven if
one noted that such publications as this provide a much healthier
stimulation than the pills which share ·the publisher's acronym.)
NORMAN FENTON,

Dominican House of Studies
_washington, D.C.

O.P.

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155

Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later. By JANET SMITH. Washington,
D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991. Pp. xvi
425. $42.95 hardcover; $17.95 paper.

+

This is an ambitious and important study. I will first offer an overview of the volume to indicate its scope and note some of its major
features. I will then respond briefly to some of the major criticisms
Smith makes of the argument against contraception advanced by Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, John Finnis, and myself.
The work contains 8 chapters and 4 appendices. Chapters 3 and 4,
as Smith says, "provide an analysis of Humanae Vitae itself and thus
constitute the heart of the hook" (p. xi). Since this is so I will first
summarize briefly Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8 and then center atten·
tion on the two central chapters and the four appendices.
Chapters 1 and 2 provide the context for Humanae Vitae. The first
chapter is devoted largely to an account of the so-called " Minority "
and "Majority" documents of the Papal Commission for the Study of
Problems of the Family, Population, and Birth Rate, while the second
seeks to summarize Catholic teaching on Christian marriage prior to
the encyclical. This summary draws principally from Pius XI's Casti
Connubii and from nn. 47-52 of Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes. Smith
takes up in some detail the issue of the" primacy" of procreation, concluding that Gaudium et Spes " seems to sidestep " this issue which, in
her judgment, is irrelevant to the question of contraception. She thinks
that this central document of Vatican II sent " mixed signals " on the
question of contraception, although she believes that several passages
" can very plausibly he read to support the position that contraception
is portrayed as a violation not only of the procreative good of marriage
hut also of the values of conjugal love" (p. 66).
Chapter 5 deals with a wide range of theological issues: the biblical
foundations for the teaching found in H umanae Vitae, the relevance of
the concept of munus for this teaching, the possibility of acting " in
good conscience " in a way contrary to its teaching, and the infallibility
of the teaching. Of special value is the extended discussion of the con·
cept expressed by the Latin term munus. Smith examines the rich
meaning of this term in several magisterial documents, including
Gaudium et Spes as well as Humanae Vitae. While a munus implies
duties, it is essentially a noble, honor-bringing "gift" or "reward,"
signifying a vocation and sublime honor. Paul VI, in developing the
integral vision of marriage in his encyclical, uses this concept to show
that God, in giving to spouses the munus of handing on new life, has
conferred on them the honor of sharing with him in the work of bring·

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ing new life into the world. Smith shows beautifully how the rich theological meaning of this term helps " illuminate and enrich " the teaching of the encyclical.
Chapters 6 and 7 investigate the arguments presented by dissenting
theologians after Humanae Vitae to justify their repudiation of its
teaching. In Chapter 6 Smith considers the views of Charles Curran
and Bernard Haering, while in Chapter 7 she examines the proportionalist approach to moral issues developed by Joseph Fuchs, Richard McCormick and others. She provides intelligent criticism both of Curran
and Haering and of proportionalist thought, focusing on the repudiation
of specific moral absolutes.
In Chapter 8 Smith provides a very helpful summary of Pope John
Paul II's understanding of the human person, human sexuality and marriage. In particular, she takes up his notion that in marriage and in
the act proper rto it man and woman make a " gift " of themselves to
one another. Simultaneously to choose to give themselves to each other
in the marital act and to contracept is then seen to involve an inner
contradiction, a falsification of the " language of the body " (pp. 230258). Smith also takes up some of the major criticisms levelled against
John Paul II's thought, in particular Lisa Sowle Cahill's, which charges
him with an overromantic view of love and a failure to recognize that
the personalist values he champions necessarily entail the conclusion
that contraception is required if a woman is rto be considered a person
fully equal to a man (pp. 258-259). Smith offers a trenchant rebuttal
to Cahill's claims.
Chapters 3 and 4, as noted earlier, "constitute the heart of the book."
Chapter 3 seeks to uncover the concept of natural law found in the
encyclical and to show how Paul VI deals with arguments advanced to
justify contraception, especially the argument based on the " totality "
of marriage and of conjugal acts within marriage. Smith believes that
the understanding of natural law at the heart of the encyclical is that
of St. Thomas, to whose teaching Paul VI refers in a key footnote in
n. 10 of his letter. According to Smith it is crucially important to
recognize that " claims that organs have natural functions that deserve
to be respected and that respecting these functions amounts to respecting an order established by God are central to the teaching of Humanae
Vitae" (p. 75).
She centers attention on a key passage in n. 11 of the encyclical,
where Paul VI says that according to the Church's understanding of
natural law "it is necessary that each conjugal act [matrimonii usus]
remain ordained in itself [per se destinatus] to the procreating of
human life" (p. 78). After analyzing this passage and comparing her
translation of the Latin text with other translations, many made from
the Italian, she concludes that it means that " couples must not tamper

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157

with the natural ordination of their marital acts" (p. 82). She thinks
that it " is going too far to say that it is intrinsically wrong to tamper
with these organs simply because such tampering is a violation of their
nature. Thus, an argument from natural ordination of organs is not
the whole of the argument against contraception. And still again, what
needs to be stressed is that it is not just the purpose or the nature of
the generative organs that is violated through contraception; rather, it
is the purpose of the conjugal act that is violated" (pp. 84-85).
Smith, in short, considers inadequate the so-called " physiological "
or " perverted faculty " argument, although she thinks that this " is part
of any [valid] argument that contraception is intrinsically wrong" (p.
88). She believes that contraception is morally wrong because it violates the purpose of the conjugal act, not of sexual organs as such, and
holds that this is the position found in Humanae Vitae.
In Chapter 4 Smith sets forth four major arguments against contraception advanced by authors who defend the teaching of Humanae
Vitae. In the previous chapter she had considered two alleged arguments and had found them wanting. One is the " physiological" argument to which reference has already been made (called " Version B "
by Smith). The other is the argument that contraception is immoral
because it is artificial ("Version A"), an argument which, as she
rightly notes, is not seriously proposed by anyone (pp. 86-87).
The four arguments discussed in Chapter 4 are the following: ( l)
"Version C," or the "intrinsic worth of human life" argument, (2)
" Version D," or the " special act of creation " argument, ( 3) " Version E," or the " contraception is contralife" argument, and ( 4) "Version F," or the "violation of the unitive meaning of the conjugal act"
argument. Version C holds that contraception is immoral because it
impedes the procreative power of actions ordained by their nature to
the generation of human life. Its claim is that " human life is such a
great good that not only should life itself be respected but so too should
the actions that lead to the coming to be of human life" (p. 101). According to this argument contraception is unnatural and immoral " because it does not acknowledge the great good that life is to Man" (pp.
101-102). Among the proponents of this argument is Carlo Caffarra.
" Version D " holds that contraception is immoral because it " impedes the procreative power of actions that are ordained by their nature to assist God in performing His creative act, which brings forth
a new human life" (p. 103). This argument is rooted in n. 13 of
Humanae Vitae, where Pope Paul VI states that anyone using God's
gift of conjugal love and jeopardizing, even if partially, its significance
and purpose, is defying the plan and holy will of God (p. 102). This
is another argument advanced by Caffarra.
" Version E " is the " contraception is contralife " argument advanced

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hy Grisez, Boyle, Finnis, and myself. Smith believes that this argument
marks a radical departure from rthe natural law tradition insofar as it
does not regard the natural orientation of organs and acts as morally
determinative. Rather it holds that contraception is immoral because
it entails a contralife will and that it is always immoral to have a con·
tralife will (pp. 105-106). Smith devotes Appendix IV to an extended
critique of this argument.
" Version F," the " violation of the unitive meaning of the conjugal act" argument, holds that contraception is immoral because it
falsifies the marital act. Contraception is, in essence, a lie (pp. 107117). A leading proponent of this argument is Pope John Paul H
(whose thought, as we have seen, is examined at length in Chapter 8);
others include Cormac Burke, Paul Quay, Mary Joyce, and John
Kippley.
Smith believes that Versions C, D, and F are sound arguments and
are rooted in the thought of Humanae Vitae. She thinks that Version
E is "essentially true hut inadequate" (p. 99) and marks a departure
from "traditional natural law theory" (p. 105).
Four Appendices are included. The first provides a fresh translation
of Humanae Vitae from the Latin. The second is a "commentary" on
the encyclical, whose " primary purpose " is to " provide a brief summary of the material [chiefly from previous magisterial documents]
cited in the footnotes of Humanae Vitae" (p. 296). In my opinion
this second appendix provides a much needed service for readers of
the encyclicaL Appendix III, quite brief, is concerned with the modi
that Pope Paul VI had inserted into the text of Gaudium et Spes.
Appendix IV is a " critique of the work of Germain Grisez, Joseph
Boyle, John Finnis, and William E. May" (p. 340). The first part of
this appendix (pp. 341-352) deals with Grisez's 1964 volume Contra·
ception and the Natural Law, while the second part (pp. 352-370) takes
up these authors' 1988 essay, " ' Every Marital Act Ought to Be Open
to New Life': Toward a Clearer Understanding" (originally published
in The Thomist 52 [1988] 365-426). Smith believes that these authors
(since I am among them I will henceforth use the first person plural
to refer to the authors and their work) do not "employ the traditional
arguments of the Church" (p. 353). Moreover, she believes, we do not
properly understand what contraception is. According to us it is not
a sexual act, whereas Smith believes that it " is a perverted sexual act,
i.e., a sexual act deprived of its proper telos" (p. 361). But her major
objection to our approach is that it shifts attention from the objective
act of contraception to the subjective intentions of the agents. Accord·
ing to Smith, " Thomistic tradition holds that the external act can be
evil, without reference to the will, insofar as it violates right reason "
(p. 356), For Aquinas and the Catholic tradition, she argues, the will

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159

becomes had because it wills an act had in itself, whereas for us the act
becomes had because it is chosen with a bad will (pp. 357-358).
I will begin here by noting an anomaly in Smith's presentation of
" Version C," the " intrinsic worth of human life " argument, in order
to show that the " contraception is contralife " argument we develop is
far from being, as Smith thinks, a departure from the Catholic tradition, but is rather rooted in that tradition. I will then reply to some of
her major criticisms of our version of this argument.
According to Smith, " Version C " holds that contraception is immoral because it impedes the procreative power of actions that are
ordained by their nature to the generation of human life (p. 101) .
Carlo Caffarra is identified as a proponent of this argument (and he
is) , and in n. 6, on p. 386, Smith cites an illuminating passage from
Caffarra which, she thinks, illustrates Version C. It will help to cite
the passage here:
in the corpus of law which was in force until 1917, the Church used a
very strong expression with regard to whoever-married or not-had re·
course to contraception: " tamquam homicida habeatur " [let him be considered one guilty of homicide]. The equivalence, or better, the analogy
that canon law established for centuries between homicide and contraception, no longer surprises us if we do not look exclusively at the be-

haviour in the two cases, but rather at the intention or movement of
the will that has recourse to contraception. Ultimately, in fact, the
decision is rationalized and motivated by the judgment: "it is not good
that a new human person should exist " . . . The anti-love inherent in
contraception is identically antilife, since there is always implicit in it
the refusal of the goodness of being, the refusal to exclaim: " How
beautiful, how good it is that you should exist" (Carlo Caffarra,
"Humanae Vitae: Venti Anni Dopo," in Humanae Vitae: 20 Anni Dopo
[Milan: Edizioni Ares, 1988], pp. 183-195, at 192; emphasis added).

I cite this text, emphasizing portions, to show that the argument Caffarra gives in this passage is not Smith's Version C, insofar as here he
says nothing about impeding the procreative power of actions ordained
by their nature to new life, which, according to Smith, is the characteristic feature of Version C. Rather, Caffarra centers attention on the
intention or movement of the will of contraceptors. Theirs is a contralife intention. Thus, it seems to me, Caffarra's argument in this
passage illustrates what Smith calls " Version E," the " contraception
is contralife " argument. What is anomalous about the matter is that
Smith praises Version C as a sound argument-and cites this passage
to illustrate it-but rejects Version E as " inadequate " and a marked
departure from the Catholic tradition. Yet Caffarra's argument in this
passage clearly locates the immorality of contraception in the contralif e
will of those who contracept.
Smith's claim that this argument departs from the tradition is simply

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erroneous. The development we give to this argument is new, hut ours
is an effort to provide a fresh formulation of a major reason why the
Catholic tradition has always rejected contraception. We begin our
version hy reminding readers of the very canon to which Caffarra refers, the Si aliquis, which summarized the teaching of the Fathers of
the Church and was included in the Church's universal law from the
thirteenth century to 1917.
Moreover, the Roman Catechism, popularly known as the Catechism
of the Council of Trent, in treating the sacrament of matrimony, incorporated this tradition, saying: "Fit ut illorum sit scelus gravissimum
qui, Matrimonio iuncti, medicamentis vel conceptum impediunt, vel
partum ahigunt, haec enim homicidarum impia conspiratio existimanda est" (Part II, ch. 7, n. 13). Ironically, Smith, in her commentary on Humanae Vitae, n. 12, notes that Paul VI refers to this
passage, and she cites it in the translation given hy Robert Bradley,
S.J., and Eugene Keyane. Yet she fails to note its significance for the
" contraception is contralife " argument, which she insists departs
from the Catholic tradition.
Smith believes that we err hy shifting attention from the objective
act of contraception to the subjective intention of the agents. According to her, we fail to recognize that the external act of contraception is
evil because it violates right reason (cf. p. 356), not because the intent
with which it is done is evil. Our approach, in other words, is subj ectivistic.
Smith, unfortunately, has seriously misconstrued our argument. After
introducing the subject, our first concern was to identify what the
human act of contraception is, insofar as moral judgment hears upon
human acts, and we identified it as an act chosen precisely to impede
the beginning of new human life, i.e., as an act embodying a contralife
choice or will (see "'Every Marital Act .. .," 369-371). Only after
identifying what contraception is did we then state our thesis, namely,
" that the contralife will that contraception involves also is morally
evil" (ibid., 374), and we then devoted a major part of our article to
demonstrating at length that an act embodying a contralife will must
always he judged morally evil precisely because that kind of human act
cannot conform to reason, i.e., to precepts of natural law (ibid., 374384) . Smith simply passes over this critically important section of our
essay. [A similar misconstrual of our argument has been made hy
Robert Connor in two essays, both entitled " Contraception and the Contralife Will," in Linacre Quarterly 57.4 (Nov. 1990) 73.93 and Gregorianum 72/4 (1991) 705-724.]
In .the section of our essay in which we identify the act of contraception we center attention on the intention of those who contracept, in
particular the choice that they make, precisely because contraception

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BOOK REVIEWS

is a human act, and as such voluntary and willed. As St. Thomas repeatedly states, " moral acts receive their species from what is intended,
not from what is outside the scope of one's intention " ("morales autem
actus recipiunt speciem secundum id quod intenditur, non autem ab eo
quod est praeter intention em ": Summa Theologiae, 2-2, 64, 7; cf. 2-2,
39, l). We focus on the inner act of electio or choice insofar as the
specifying object of this inner act of choice is the human act in question, namely, the act of contraception: "electio semper est humanorum
actuum" (Summa Theologiae, l-2, 13, 4). In short, acts are morally
significant and are morally assessed in terms of their kind or intrinsic
character just insofar as they are willed and are expressions of the
agent's free, self-determining choice. And, we argue, in contracepting
one's choice is precisely to impede the beginning of a new life. One's
choice is thus contralife.
Smith calls attention to an example we use to show that contraception is not a sexual act, namely, that of a dictator who has a fertilityreducing agent added to the water supply. We hold that the dictator
is the one who contracepts, not the people who drink the water and
subsequently engage in intercourse, insofar as the object of the dictator's
free, self-determining choice is precisely to impede the beginning of
new human life. This is what he does. Smith says that the dictator is
not a contraceptor, although, paradoxically, she thinks him guilty of
the sin of contraception (even though he does not contracept ! ) , whereas
the people who drink the water and then engage in intercourse are contraceptors but guiltlessly so. But surely the dictator is doing something
that meets Pope Paul VI's definition of contraception in n. 14 of
Humanae Vitae: he is doing something prior to intercourse, intending
what he does as a means of impeding procreation.
Smith's work is a worthwhile and helpful study, one I will surely
use in a course devoted to the philosophical and theological foundations of the encyclical and its teaching. Her translation from the Latin
and her commentary, in which she painstakingly examines the references given in the footnotes of H umanae Vitae, are especially valuable.
In addition, her rich analysis of the concept of munus, so central to
the thought of the encyclical, and her discussion of many other matters, in particular the thought of Pope John Paul II, are greatly helpful
to anyone interested in the truth. Her book needs to be read and
studied carefully and merits a wide audience. I hope that in future
editions she omits Appendix IV and recognizes that the argument
against contraception because of its contralife character is rooted in
the Catholic tradition and is far from being a novelty.
WILLIAM

Pontifical John Paul ll Institute
Washington, D. C.

E. MAY